Passing through the storm
by Chris Kenworthy
Summary: After broadcasting the truth about Miranda, Serenity flies on to a world rebelling against the Alliance, and the crew get drawn into various new adventures.
1. Chapter 1

Part One

"Please, mei-mei, don't kill the hwoon dahn!" Simon called across Serenity's cargo hold.

River Tam looked back at him for a moment, not entirely withdrawing her attention from the two space-suited goons who were the subject of discussion. "I wasn't going to do anything fatal," she told him in her best witheringly sisterish voice. "Just beat on them a little while."

"Hmm." Simon considered that, coming closer. "Beating is okay. Maiming is not."

Just at this point, one of the goons seemed to have come to the notion that even though this little slip of a girl had managed to take him and his friend by surprise the first time around, there wasn't any chance that she really COULD bring the beat-down now that he was ready for her tricks, and pulled out a knife from a small opening in his trousers, under one thigh. River actually smiled a fierce little smile as she jumped into an arcing roundhouse kick, dashing his face to one side. The sharp blade slid across fingers, drawing blood, before it clattered away on the deck.

By a few minutes later, most of the crew were gathered around the prone bodies of the two mercenary bounty hunters, and River was nearly beaming at the fact that they weren't trying for any more rematches. "Well, umm, that's mighty impressive," Zoe pointed out. "But we're not out of trouble yet. Serenity is tethered that they came in on, their boss has a small magnetic rail gun at the ready, and I doubt that even you can pilot us out of here well enough to avoid getting the ship riddled with holes, girl."

"Yes, that's a problem," Mal Reynolds said in a low tone. The ship was two days out of Persephone's dockyards, where they'd repaired an awful lot of damage, and only about a day away from the Heinlein planetary system, to return Inara Serra to the Paquin Companion training house where she was an instructor. Mal had been keeping an eye out for trouble, but by the time anybody had spotted the bounty hunter's ship it had been too late - their efforts to evade its intercept course had come to nothing, and the lead hunter had ordered him to send over a tether and prepare to be boarded or the ship would be holed. Mal had done all of that, (they only HAD one tether, to boot,) and had watched nervously as the two searchers had arrived, and quickly headed over to surround River, sounding surprised that she was right there, practically in front of the airlock, and not hiding away. They were also surprised when River immediately took the initiative, and began to use her recently-acquired fighting skills on them.

"C-captain," Kaylee Frye spoke up nervously. All of this fighting sort of stuff usually did seem to make her more'n a mite twitchy. "What... what would Book say if - if he were here??"

Oh, have I managed to do something that would've earned me another sermon? Mal wondered to himself for a moment. But then the other possible interpretation of Kaylee's words hit him. Despite his religious sensibilities, Shepherd Derrial Book had proved to often be a level-headed and sensible voice in a crisis situation, with mysterious know-how about weapons and police procedures that didn't really fit with his stated monastic background - a mystery that would perhaps never be explained, though Mal did have his own suspicions now.

Mal didn't have the specific know-how about criminals or guns, (well, he did have some experience of his own in those fields,) but now that Kaylee had put the question, he realized what the level-headed and sensible thing to say was. "We need to question them, find out their orders and the boss' mission. Everything we do next depends on that."

The wounded men proved disgustingly eager to spill their guts - Mal hoped that he'd never sing so sweetly unless he'd at LEAST been maimed - and the picture came clear. There was indeed a parliament contract out on all of them, but River was the most valuable, and Simon Tam next after his sister. Nobody had thought to include specifics in the bounty about just how dangerous River was hand-to-hand now.

"Then... then I need to get aboard their ship," River suddenly blurted out. "Not as helpless as I seem... you need to deal with them, knock out the big gun, before the Firefly is safe."

Mal turned to Simon, wondering what his reaction to this plan would be. But Simon just smiled slightly - he still felt protective of his little River, but had started to accept the idea that there were some situations in which she was able to take care of herself. Witnessing the scene where a full score of Reavers had all been killed or disabled and little River was the only one left standing probably had a lot to do with that. "So - you'll appear to be restrained, cuffed or something like that, but the restraints will be pre-disabled to make sure you'll be able to, umm, to shuck them easily?" Simon clarified.

"Yeah, that'll help I guess."

They worked quickly, aware that the hunter boss was probably wondering why he hadn't heard any news in so long. The prisoners were initially reluctant to play out their parts, but when Jayne pointed out that Mal and Simon could take their suits and look more than a little like them, while the original owners of the suits could then get shot or shoved out of a different hatch, a deal was quickly struck. Mal watched nervously as three space-suited figures moved down the tether to the hunter's ship, the small one in the middle unable to grab the line herself and being pushed along from behind and pulled from ahead, like a sack of cargo.

Mal wondered if he'd have been able to handle himself on the tether as well as those men. He hadn't had much experience in using it lately - the omni-latch docking ports like the one around the cargo bay airlock were truly ubiquitous, and it wasn't very hard with modern nav computers and micro-jets to match courses and seal the hatches together. Even an old ship like Serenity could do it. Tethers were becoming a holdover from an older time, although they still had their uses. In this case, it was useful for the hunter ship to have Serenity stuck like a fish caught on a hook, while still being far enough away to be able to aim its gun, which would have been much more awkward with the two ships clamped together.

All sorts of memories of recent events washed over Mal like a tide that he couldn't fight off. Running away from Reavers on Lilac. Seeing River in the bar on Beaumonde, surrounded by tough customers who she'd beaten the crap out of without even trying. The man with the spectacles, the Operative, smiling so condescendingly at him in Inara's room at the training house. Book as he lay dying, surrounded by the ruins of the Haven settlement. The horrible stillness of a Miranda street. Wash cheering about being a leaf on the wind, after landing Serenity near Mister Universe's home...

"Come on, captain." It was Zoe's voice, cutting through his reverie, the only person who could bring him out of his own thoughts when he was in so deep - or was she really? "River's calling us from the mercenary ship."

"What, already?" He looked up, and Zoe just smiled tightly at him.

"She wants to know if we're going to take anything of theirs before crippling their engine," Kaylee reported. "I'd sure like to have a look-see in their spare parts box, if they've got one."

"We can see if they've got anything that's really worth eating," Zoe added in.

Mal thought about the fact that he hadn't been the one to order this round of looting, and decided to ignore that. A good idea was a good idea, after all. "Okay, umm... I'll be in the cockpit, just checking to make sure that they don't have friends coming by to help."

"They don't look so much like friendly folk - captain," Simon pointed out.

"Oooh, I wonder how much work it'd take to strip that rail gun," Jayne put in. Zoe stared at him. "Yes, I realize that we probably can't mount it on ourselves. But there's no point in leaving them with a big gun, is there? We can leave it here in the cargo bay, and sell it somewhere, maybes."

"Just make sure that you figure out a way to turn it off before leaving River alone with it," Zoe said, laughing, as she reached for her space suit, and then reconsidered. Looking out the airlock windows, she smiled slightly. "Looks like she's bringing the other ship in for a docking."

"River knows how to fly an unfamiliar ship after, what, four minutes?" Mal complained under his breath.

------------

"We can't go back to Paquin, or anywhere near Heinlein," Inara argued forcibly. She'd been the one member of the ship's company who hadn't been around earlier, and now the last of the looted goods were being carried through the open airlock doors. Simon was suiting up, getting ready to help Jayne bring the rail gun in once the ships decoupled again. "It's much too dangerous. Everything that those shiong-tsan sha-shoo said -- they and their boss were just the early birds. There are others - Alliance special ops and much better prepared mercenaries. They'll be waiting for us at Paquin, at the ruins of Haven, at Beaumonde and anywhere else they expect you might go. Probably we only just got out of Persephone quick enough to escape a special hospitality committee."

"I said that I'd get you back to your girls, and..."

"Not if you get us both killed, you won't!" Inara flared, and then immediately offered up a slightly apologetic smile. She was as lovely as ever, and that beauty and presence hit him with more force than usual. She was wearing an outfit that was fairly different from her usual sophisticated trousseau, just rough brown pants, soft gray jacket over a somewhat low-cut white undershirt, but somehow that just made her appearance enticing - because she seemed a little more approachable than usual. Probably she had just used up whatever clothes were in that forgotten trunk, and had borrowed some things quietly from Zoe. None of them had had much time for little things like laundry, and she'd been through much that would tend to stain fancy fabrics. No, if she were running low on wardrobe, she could surely have found something more suitable on Persephone, and Inara would have credit to draw on... "I, I release you from that obligation, Mal. I'm in no hurry to get back to the Training House, and I wouldn't want anyone else to get hurt on my account."

No hurry to get back? Mal had to try hard not to smile at that. He hadn't really been that eager to see Inara back to her new home, in truth, because recent events had forced him to admit to himself some of what he felt for the lady, but he'd gone ahead with those plans because it seemed like the right thing to do - and in hopes of provoking a confession that she didn't want to be seperated from him either. She hadn't said that in so many words, but he would take what had been said at face value.

"Okay then," he called out in a louder voice. "What's our safest harbour, then, if we're not continuing on to Paquin?" Zoe perked up at that, drifting closer, and Kaylee hurried to dump a brimming basket of dirty machine parts so that she could join in the conference. "Inara has pointed out that anywhere the Alliance would expect us to be going is not a good idea - like Haven, or Mister Universe's place, or Beaumonde, or back to Persephone."

"Right," Zoe joined in. "Neither should we head to the inner worlds, as unexpected as that might be. Despite some rumblings from the broadcast, the Parliament's forces are still quite strong there."

"What about Boros?" Kaylee asked. "Not going to be many Alliance troops worrying about chasing us there."

"Boros?" Mal repeated. "There were planet-wide riots reported on Boros - gunfire in the streets."

"According to one of my sources, the situation has quieted down," Inara said. Wait a gorram minute, Mal thought to himself. Since when does Inara have 'sources'? "Things were, umm... a bit unsettled, but anti-Alliance forces appear to be keeping the peace. In fact, there are impromptu festivals going on there. We would probably be welcomed and protected." She sighed. "Of course, the Alliance 'puppet theater' is denying all of that, since they can't admit that they've been chucked out, but..."

"And Boros isn't far off of our present heading," River said, startling Mal - he hadn't seen her come back or join the group. Looking around, Mal realized that the airlocks had been disengaged. Jayne and Simon weren't around - probably they were wrapping a long plastic 'bag' around the detatched rail gun, which was the only safe way of getting it inside a ship since it was too long to fit in the airlock. "I can start heading us there."

"Hmm." Mal considered all of this. "Alright, make the course change, sweetie." He didn't want them to land on Boros without checking the opinions of the last two members of the crew, and maybe finding out some more details about the situation there if they could, but they had enough fuel to make the change now - it would take them away from any other nasty surprises on the route to Paquin after all.

"No making course changes until my brother's inside the ship," River pointed out, and Mal mentally kicked himself for not thinking of that one. If Serenity's engine started to burn, the two of them might get left behind. "And Jayne, too, I guess."

Mal shook his head and headed for the upstairs front hall. He could do with a bit of shut-eye.

------------

Simon logged off of the cortex, feeling that he couldn't take any more news of upheaval and dissent. He'd been trying to find out any specifics about his parents, back on Osiris - he hadn't spoken to them in years, but something about this situation, and the odd vindication he felt from River's sudden turn towards mental health, had impelled him to investigate.

The news wasn't good. He hadn't been able to get any answer at the old communications number for Gabriel Tam's house, and the 'person-finder' network was apparently overloaded, or sabotaged, and wasn't giving him any sort of responses. The news reports said that Osiris was relatively quiet compared to the 'unrest' on the outer planets, but that there had been well-organized acts of violence against Alliance officials - and his father had been one of the regional administrators for the Alliance terraformation commission - the same branch of the bureaucracy that had presumably implemented the Miranda Pax project in the first place. Simon hadn't even remembered that detail until after the broadcast had been sent out, but if what they'd done - if what River had helped them discover had led to their father's death, maybe mother's as well...

No, even if that was the cost, it had been the right thing to do, though Simon detested the thought of mob violence taking their fury out at convenient scapegoats. (And how easy was it to 'pay' that cost, thinking of parents who he had been estranged from for so long, after all.) Leaving his room near the stern of Serenity, Simon climbed up the back stairs, and checked into the engine room before heading up towards the forwards hall.

He didn't need to go forwards. Kaylee was sitting in the engine room, as he might have expected, her legs crossed on the floor opposite from the hammock that she still kept just inside the doorway here. She was surrounded by piles that she had made of the looted parts from the bounty hunter ship, and Simon smiled as a very old expression came into his head: 'As happy as a clam in mud.' He wasn't actually sure about clams, but thought that they were shellfish that were farmed only on New Melbourne for food. Might have originally come from Earth-that-was, come to think on it...

"Simon!" Kaylee exclaimed enthusiastically when she saw him, and tried to get up, but Simon made a gesture encouraging her to stay where she was, and managed to balance sitting in the hammock, staring back at her.

"So, are we well stocked now??"

"Well, we're not really stocked until I get everything stowed away in its proper place," Kaylee replied. From his vantage point, a small V of cleavage could be seen down the neck of her shirt, exciting him deep down. "Doing alright, about as well as ever or better around here. Of course, I wouldn't say no to picking up a spare for the main drive feed, not to mention a transistorized diagnostic rod so that I can get instant readings on the reaction chamber, but - well, fixing ourselves up on Persephone took enough coin. I wouldn't ask the captain for no more..."

"Maybe I can find some way to help when we hit Boros," Simon said slowly. Kaylee immediately stared at him, a mix of surprise and childish longing on her face. "Now, I just said maybe."

"Now, just how would you be doing such a thing as that?" Kaylee asked. "You don't have 'Verse-wide credit that we know about, or contacts among mechanic retailers." Her eyes bored into him. "I won't have you pawining your medic's kit, or something like that, just to..."

Simon had to laugh. "No, my darling my heart, it's nothing like that. But - you remember what our initial heading was when I first booked passage - with River in the cryo box??"

"Umm... from Persephone to Boros, yeah," Kaylee said slowly. "What with Dobson turnin' out to be a fed, an' me gettin' shot, and the detour to Whitefall, and Reavers showin' up, we never did make it there, not since you've been on board after all." Simon nodded. "After leaving Whitefall, we moseyed on over to Regina, where Mal met with Niska the first time and we pulled the train job." Something suddenly occured to her. "You... you'd made plans for something after arriving on Boros, of course you would have. And since you never made it, on account of you stayed on the ship with us, those arrangements are still -- you figure that they're still good, after everything that's happened?"

Simon nodded slowly. "Not everything, of course - I'd had some notion to take a long-haul ship out from Boros to the Laranan outposts - the inquries I made about that don't amount to much by now..."

"Laranan?" Kaylee asked, trying to place it for a long time. "Ohh, the Alliance mining camps circling around another star?"

"Yeah," he agreed. "It's our sun's companion, actually, not too far compared to all the other stars in the sky. I thought that I could wake River up and sign up as a doctor - they need professionals like that, and by the time any of the crew discovered that we were fugitive, maybe they'd be far enough away from the worlds not to care. Of course, that was before I realized how messed up River really was." Kaylee nodded. "Anyway, there is somebody on Boros who's holding some valuables for me that I was able to ship from Osiris. I don't imagine he'd be much inconvenienced by the unrest there, and he was told as a man who'd live up to his obligations."

"Alright, good enough," Kaylee agreed. "But - well, you don't need to spend that money on me..."

"I'm not going to blow it all on your engine room, right away," Simon quickly disclaimed. Kaylee quickly tried to hide her disappointment at that. "But... but picking up a few things, if I can, would be something that I know will make you happy." He leaned down closer to her. "And, in case you haven't picked up on it yet, I really love to see you happy."

Kaylee giggled at that. "Alright." And she started to rearrange the spare parts with purposeful movements. "Say, why didn't you suggest we fly past Boros sometime, if you had shinies there you wanted to collect."

"I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, I suppose," Simon said. "After all, once I'd taken the post of medic, I was crew, and crew aren't really supposed to have a say in where the ship ends up." Kaylee considered this and nodded. "Also, well, I knew that the stuff would keep okay, and figured it might be best to leave it until it was needed, or at least until there were other reasons to make planetfall at Boros."

"Fair enough." With that, Kaylee moved over a bunch of flat, vaguely card-shaped metal devices and stood herself up. "So, your room or mine?"

Simon burst out laughing. "Umm... I always like spending time in yours." Kaylee's eyes twinkled and she led the way out and through the ship's lounge area. "In fact, well... I've sort of wondered if it makes that much sense for the two of us to have our own quarters - me way in the back and you way in the front, and all."

She turned back to look at him, and bumped into a chair, nearly tripping over it... "You - you mean, you're wantin' to shack up with me already? Move... move in together, I mean?"

"'Already'?" Simon's face fell. "It was too soon to bring it up, huh? Sorry, umm... I never can manage to say the right thing at the right time, can I now? I guess it'd be too much to ask to forget I said it, but... huh?" It suddenly occured to him that Kaylee, who had straightened herself out with Simon's help, was now very firmly pushing him back towards the three-quarter-circle couch in a corner of the lounge. "Hmm?"

"Just figured I'd go for the nearest spot that we could talk this through, and not have any more accidents," she pointed out. Simon sat down on the couch, expecting Kaylee to take the spot opposite him and look into his face, but she surprised him again by planting her butt down right next to him, his skin thrilling to her touch. "First off, I didn't mean to give you that impression just by using the word 'already.' Yeah, we've only really been together for a few days I s'pose, but we've been friends and all for much longer than that, and I... well, actually, I'm not sure what I think of as an appropriate time to be movin' in with a fella, because I never have gone and done it."

"Me neither," Simon agreed. "Well, with a girl - or a guy, come to think of it - if you discount my freshman year at the medical school, where all the underclassmen got assigned into double-rooms by the computer." Kaylee snickered.

"And I guess... well, I know that River is doing much better lately, but I thought that you would still want to be staying next to her," Kaylee continued. "Just in case she has some sort of problem in the night..."

"Well, not that it does her much good if I'm spending more than half my nights in your bunk," Simon pointed out. "But yeah - I guess that I want to talk to her about it before we move ahead with anything. I hope that you don't mind that notion."

"Not a bit," Kaylee agreed with a bright smile. "It's funny to be talking about it at this point, actually... as long as I've been on this ship, there's been a couple sharing a room - being Zoe and Wash, I mean."

"Really?" Simon was surprised how interested he was in this tidbit about Serenity before he'd arrived. "They were married back when Mal took you on?"

"Engaged, but they was bunkin' together." Kaylee winked at him. "And, well, now that Wash isn't here any more, it seems weird that we should be talkin' about trying to take their place, in an odd way."

"If it makes you feel too uncomfortable, like we'd be rubbing Zoe's nose in what she's lost," Simon hastily said, "then we don't have to..."

"Well, we'll see honey," she said, patting his hand.

"Do you know how quickly Wash and Zoe got together?" Simon asked. "I mean, I heard the story about him 'rubbing her the wrong way' when Mal was recruiting him... and that mustache." Kaylee giggled and shook her head. "And I never thought that Bester was here for that long before the captain decided he wasn't working out. If Zoe and Wash were already engaged by the time, umm, by the time Bester showed you his engines..."

"I, I'm not too sure," Kaylee admitted, laughing. "Maybe two-three months, from the time they took their first flight, before I saw Serenity. Bester had been working on the ship a few weeks before, and Wash wasn't on the payroll long before the firefly flew. I don't really know at what point in that period... when Wash started rubbing Zoe the RIGHT way. Probably not a good time to ask her about it now - the Cap'n might know."

"Well, maybe we talk to him tomorrow," Simon said, pulling the prettiest girl in the entire 'verse closer to him, and she eagerly met him with a kiss.

------------

Jayne stomped up to the cockpit in the depth of the ship's night, and blinked in surprise when he saw someone sitting in the pilot's chair. "Oh, hi Jayne," Zoe said a bit faintly. "What are you doing up?"

Jayne wasn't quite sure if she meant 'up' as in awake, or 'up here in the cockpit,' so he tried to answer both at once. "Ehh, couldn't sleep much after that surprise we had earlier. Figured I'd come by and see if any little red lights were blinkin' or anything."

"Nah, everything seems quiet." Zoe herself didn't seem to be touching any of the controls, just watching them occasionally and looking out through the big glass forward windows. "I couldn't get to sleep either - don't think I've got more than half an hour of shuteye ever since..."

"Yeah," Jayne grunted. Zoe looked up at him. "Well, not that I understand what you're goin' through or anything... I never have had a little woman that I care for a quarter as much as Wash meant to you, know that much." He considered. "Not sure if I've had a crewmate who meant anything like that much to me, come to think on it."

Zoe raised an elegant eyebrow. "Who would you say you are closest to, out of... well, out of our crew? I'm curious - not that you should feel you need to share, or anything..."

"Nah, it's a fair question," Jayne said, trying to lean comfortably against the wall. "Let's see, Mal -- wouldn't be the one." Zoe spluttered and laughed a bit. "Nothin' against him - since bringin' me on board he's always tried to do right by me, lived up to his word - but sometimes he is just the 'verse's biggest dumbass, you know?" Zoe hesitated before nodding slightly. "Now, the preacher, if I'm allowed to include him, would be a contender. Didn't think much of him at first, but... well, those last few weeks before he left, we was spending a lot of time together. Good man, and more to him than there seemed. But still - well, it was like somebody ripped off a little finger when I saw him die, I guess, but we hadn't known each other that much, and neither of us were in a mood to share much over that time."

"Alright," Zoe said. "Go on."

"Kaylee..." Jayne drawled, and Zoe raised an eye. "Not sure if I can explain what I think of her, because it isn't all of a piece. Sometimes I kinduv think of her like a little sister that I never had, grownin' up. And then there are other times..."

"Yes?" Zoe prompted when Jayne hesitated. Without a word, he spun away from the wall and crossed the cockpit, making sure that nobody else was coming up the passage into the cockpit, because he certainly didn't want another soul to hear this.

"Sometimes I wish it was ever possible t'were me she looked at with those moony eyes, instead of... instead of the Doc. And hope that I'd ever be able to treat her well enough to keep her, if she gave me a chance."

Zoe thought about that for a moment. "Do... do you think that that might have had something to do with your decision back on Ariel?"

"What, you mean that I was more interested in removing the competition than getting..." Jayne did a double-take. "Wait a second - you didn't know about what I did on Ariel!!"

"Not for sure, until now," Zoe admitted, chuckling slightly. "I'm not an idiot, and I had my suspicions. Especially when Simon started treating you differently - he figured it out, right? When we got the Lassiter??"

"Yeah, he did," Jayne admitted. "Had a great opportunity to give me some payback, too, and instead took a road so high that I can't even see it from here. But that's enough talkin' about HIM, especially if I'm going to get back to your question. There's one left in the crew that I do feel close to, maybe closest of all, and that may be a surprise because it's you."

"Not so much a shock, I suppose," Zoe admitted. "We may come from different backgrounds, but we've worked side by side on a lot of different jobs, on a more or less equal footing, which I guess you don't feel with Mal because he's the one giving the orders." She sighed. "And not that it hasn't been fun talkin' with you, but I think either you leave me alone here or I'm going elsewhere alone."

"Hey, you were here first," Jayne said. "I can go down into the bay and get the weight bench set up again."

"Cool, leave it up," she said with a faint wave of farewell. "I'll do some training of my own later."

And Jayne smiled slightly as he got up and left.

-------------

River walked into the dining room so quietly that Simon, who had been preparing some breakfast, hadn't even heard her come in. There had been quite a bit of good food looted from the bounty hunter ship - all of the fresh produce had gone the day before, but there were still some baked goods and preserves that had been made from fresh ingredients left. "Oooh! Hey, you startled me there, sis."

"It's fine with me, do whatever you want. Move into Kaylee's room, or have her move into yours. You're a big boy, and I'll be okay."

It took a moment for Simon to get his mental gears running at the right speed. "You know, it's very frustrating to have you open a conversation in the middle like that, responding to something that you've seen inside my mind."

River smiled tightly. "Well, it's very frustrating for me to have to wait for you to say what's on your mind when I can already tell. Can we meet in the middle somewhere?"

"Umm... this is literally the first time I've seen you since talking to Kaylee!" Simon insisted. "You could at least give me a chance to open up and share."

River considered this, and then had to admit, "Okay. I was presuming that you wouldn't tell me, and that isn't fair." Though there was a little twinkle in her eyes that suggested to Simon maybe she knew better than him whether he would have broached the subject quickly. "Oooh, okay, this idea is a little bit involved, I realize, but maybe I can go up and take over River's bunk. I'm pretty much the pilot now, so that'll be okay. Then Kaylee can sweet-talk Mal into saying it's okay for you guys to break down the wall between my old room and yours. Then you'll have a double-sized quarters. Shouldn't affect the hull integrity in any serious way..."

"Umm, yeah, I'll take that in mind, but it does seem like a little much," Simon admitted. "After all, I kinduv like being snug with Kaylee. We don't need all of that much space." He was thinking of Zoe and Wash, who hadn't had a bunk double the size of anybody else's. It wasn't even as fancy as Mal's, he thought.

"Yeah, that's what you think now, before she clutters up the drawers so much with parts for her latest cortex terminal modifications and so on that there's no room for your clothes," River giggled. "Well, up to you. Just wanted to let you know that I'm okay with the idea." She sighed. "Seriously. I mean, you've been an idiot about Kaylee for so long, I wouldn't want to do anything to get in the way of this."

Simon's mouth quirked as he started to smear blueberry jam on rusks. "So, you don't think that wanting to move in together so soon is another example of idiocy?"

She considered that, taking a slice of toasted rye and munching on it plain. "Well, it's not your usual brand of idiocy," she pointed out, "and Kaylee seems to be just about as foolishly eager, so I think that it'll probably work out okay." And with that, she headed fore towards the cockpit.

-----------

Mal was wandering around in the cargo bay when he heard some motion in the third passenger quarters. By this point, he'd heard something on the ship's grapevine about the notion of Kaylee and Simon moving in together, though neither of the lovebirds had actually asked him about it straight out. (Not that he minded at all - maybe they'd be more likely to keep their canoodling out of public places when they had a room that was 'theirs.') But the third room was an unlikely place for Kaylee to be going for that reason - it was across the hall from Simon's, yes, but not close otherwise. Curious now, he headed over and poked her head in.

"Oh, hi Mal." Mal was caught between the urge to blink and the impulse to stare, and staring won out for the meantime. It was Inara who was inside, and she just kept on surprising him. For one thing, she was apparently in the middle of tidying a few things, or more specifically, making the small cot up again with blazingly white and fresh linen. Also, she was dressed even more casually than yesterday - well, if 'casual' was the best term to use, Mal wasn't sure. She had on a short silky - an underslip or something like that? Vaguely skirty, anyway, and a matching deep blue-green fancy camisole top or something. Her richly dark hair was pinned back in a simple ponytail, and as she moved away from the bed to sit in the room's only chair, Mal could see that her feet were bare. His gaze also strayed automatically to the other end of her gorgeous legs as she sat, but somehow Inara had managed to arrange herself decorously despite the little that there was to her slip, so that all he could see was a teasing peek at some upper thigh. "Um, was there something in particular you wanted other than to ogle me like this? I might have to start charging you for this sort of thing, you know."

Mal flinched, but at least the words were spoken in a teasing tone. "Umm, well, first of all, I was just wondering who was settlin' in here," he mentioned. "Figured that you were happy in the shuttle."

Inara's full lips assumed a puzzled frown. "The shuttle? I... I haven't really - I mean, I've been inside, you know that, but I haven't been sleeping in there or anything. Not that anybody much was in a mood to sleep in the trip to Miranda and back, but..."

"Really? Then you've been in here the whole time?" Mal was stunned that he hadn't realized such a thing on his own ship.

"Pretty much, yes," she admitted. "The - the shuttle didn't feel like home any more, and I wanted to be near to someone else. Simon felt the same, I figure, and it didn't seem to be disrespectful to Derrial or anything..."

"Book? Oh, no, I guess not." They'd cleaned up the room a little after Shephard Book had meticulously moved his few belongings out to remain on Haven - more for the sake of Alliance surprise patrols than anything else. What with the increased interest on River's reader powers at the time, nobody had been talking about taking on paying passengers. They often did end up to be more trouble than they were worth - just look at Simon himself. (Mal realized that he didn't really mean that thought.)

"Okay, so was there anything else?" Inara said pointedly. She hadn't moved to grab a coverup or anything, and Mal was wondering if she was teasing again, acting upset about the notion of him looking at what she was showing, without doing a single thing to stop it.

"Umm... also curious about some of your wardrobe choices, as of lately."

She rolled her expressive eyes behind their thick lashes. "Most of my stuff, and even the clothes that I borrowed from Zoe, are in the laundry devices. Which Kaylee finally got working again."

"There was a problem with the washin' machines??" Mal asked. Yet one more thing that he'd been too distracted of late to notice. Inara didn't reply, just made a slyly mocking face at him. "And... why didn't you go shopping for clothes on Persephone?" Something from that time he and Kaylee had been to the ball tugged at his memory. "Didn't want anybody to know that you had to buy clothes off the rack?"

"No, actually... I was busy, and knew that you wanted to leave soon - and I didn't realize that we wouldn't be heading straight back home," Inara answered. All of that seemed to add up, so he took half a step back from the door.

"Well, that's all of my questions answered then, and have a good afternoon. We'll be arriving at Boros somethin' like tomorrow evening. Dinner's at the usual time." He needed to make a bit more of an effort to get involved in routine, he decided.

"Why thank you, captain," Inara called back as he left. "Perhaps we could meet for a drink after dinner? After all, there's probably an escapade or two that I need to get caught up on."

He turned back toward the door, though he couldn't see her from that spot. "Only if you tell me all the gossip about your girls and fellow teachers.

A soft laugh was his only reply. It took Mal a second to realize that the laugh wasn't Inara's. "What the heck? Where is she hiding? River!"

-----------

Kaylee sighed, logged off of her cortex, headed up the ladder from her quarters - and nearly bumped into Mal. "Oh, hey there, I need to tell you..."

Mal smiled warmly. "It's all right. I don't have no issues with you and Simon moving in together - his room, or yours. Though I'm not too wild about River's idea, with the knocking down of walls."

"Knocking down walls?" Kaylee snorted. "I ain't even heard that one."

"Oh, well never mind then..."

"And that wasn't at all what I wanted to say," she pointed out. Mal mouthed 'whoops.' "Just got off the cortex with, umm, with a mutual friend over on Hera. She had word from Regina, and Jesse Sanchez."

"Jesse?" Max repeated. "What could... oh, did he make it??"

"Yeah," Kaylee nodded. "Apparently he wasn't there when... when Alliance police raided the repair center. They'd moved in quick, not worrying too much about catching everybody in one sweep, and he was able to lose the mop-up squad that went to track him down."

"Hmm." Mal was weighing the import of that news in his mind. "Good for him... but maybe not so good for us. Jesse's got a vindictive streak - he's lost his brother, a lot of friends, and the business that was handed down from his grandpappy. Any notion if he knows that I had anything to do with his misfortunes??"

"No, not really," Kaylee admitted. "But it probably won't be long before he finds out about the other raids - and we're the one element in common between everybody who got hit."

"True enough," Mal admitted. "I didn't even realize that the Alliance knew so much about our dealings. Did - did you let our Heranian friend know where we are, or where we're going?"

"No, I don't think so," Kaylee replied. "And Regina is a long way from Boros, especially at this extremity of disjunction."

"Yeah, I know," Mal muttered. "But still - I worry." He sighed, heading over to the stairway landing. "Frankly, I wish that you HAD been wanting to talk to me about yourself and our Doctor."

"Well, I can give you all sorts of juicy details if you like," she teased. There was a short silence. "Umm, that was a joke - you're supposed to act all big-brother or father-like and express your distaste for knowing anything about my sex life."

"Well, I didn't ask to hear anything," Mal pointed out. They started to walk down the stairs. "Let's say that I'm happy for your happiness and leave it at that."

"It's so easy to tell that things are going well?"

"You have a tendency to wear your heart on your face, Kaywinnit Lee," Mal pointed out, then quirked one side of his mouth. "In, umm, in that it's fairly easy to see what's going on in there - especially for those of us have known you a while." He sighed. "And come to think of it, since your own love life is doing so well, maybe I ought as well bite the bullet, open myself up for future mockery, and ask if you can help me arrange one of my own."

"Really?" Kaylee said, an awestruck expression spreading over her face. "Like, as in, with Inara?"

"As in, just for example," Mal admitted. "She... things are better with her and me than they ever felt when she was renting in the shuttle - you knew that she's living in back now, with Simon and River?"

"Yeah, of course, who could miss a thing like that?" Kaylee asked. Mal tried not to react to that question.

"So, we're getting along better, and even maybe flirting in some fashion, but... but I never know how to get beyond that, how to get a serious answer out of her."

"Have you asked her a serious question?" Kaylee asked. Mal puzzled over that to himself. "Anyway, I highly recommend being honest and forthright. Not that I ever really was - I was too afraid to make it clear to Simon how I felt, and it took the fear of very gruesome death for him to actually say it first."

Mal laughed. "Alright. Anything else?"

"Yeah, look for a romantic restaurant or something once we hit Boros."

He shook his head slowly.

TO BE CONTINUED... 


	2. Chapter 2

Part Two

"Hmm." Jayne tasted the food that had been placed in front of him with all of the seriousness of a connoisseur or a gourmet. "Yeah, not bad - I like that. Who fixed it up, anyway?"

"A pretty big group effort, actually," River admitted. "Simon, Kaylee, Inara, and myself."

"Yeah, it's good stuff, and thanks," Zoe added. "Might as well use the real stuff while we can, since the yeast rations don't spoil."

"And maybe by this time tomorrow night, we'll getting feasted by the Boros provisional government!" Jayne enthused, and took another big forkful.

"Not bad," Mal said, trying his food a little more cautiously once the rest of the table had tucked in. "What's it called, anyway?"

"You're kidding, right?" Kaylee asked him, "Just macaroni in spaghetti sauce." Mal's face remained a little blank. "Well, I guess it may not have been typical ranch food back on Shadow, but I'd figured you'd have run into Italian at some point in your travels."

"I've had eetalion food," Mal insisted, mangling the pronunciation a bit. "There was one time, before you signed up, when we ended up on Beylix, with some money to spend but no way off because..."

"Because of Bester, yeah," Zoe agreed, smiling at the thought. "Pretty good italian cook in the town there - introduced us to pizza, and catch-a-toree roasted chicken, and a few other things."

"Like, real chickens that used to cluck?" Jayne muttered, more than a little impressed. Mal nodded.

"We had pasta there, come to think of it," Mal muttered. "Spaghetti, which is a bit like these things." He poked at some shell-shaped pieces of macaroni. "But never a sauce like this."

"I'm not sure if you'll ever come across a sauce quite like this again, considering the effort we put in to making do with it," Simon admitted. "Half of the meat is yeast-based, and a lot of the 'vegetable' chunks. The other half of the meat was dry preserves. But the tomatoes and carrots are real - canned, but made from vegetables that grew in the ground, I'm pretty sure." After a bite, he reconsidered part of that statement. "Okay, maybe they grew in a test tube, but they were still real vegetables."

"Can we talk about something OTHER than the food now?" Inara asked. There was an awkward silence following that request. "Umm, River, have you given any thought to, umm, to what else you want to do with your life, now that you've, umm, figured out some of the issues that were occupying you when you first arrived here?"

River beamed. "Not so much, I admit - still getting used to being sane again, and what I can do when I put my mind to it. And... and there are some things that they did to me back in the Academy that haven't gone away, just because I got the demons inside of me out."

"Like the Amidala thing?" Jayne said absently, scarfing up macaroni.

"Amygdala," River corrected sternly. "Yeah, like that. And - well, I'm home here, I've known that for a long time. I've got a couple of different hats that I can grow into right here on Serenity." She sighed. "There... there are still things that I'd like to learn, though - subjects that I can't find out about just by tapping into the public Cortex. That, that drive to learn more was what drew me into the Academy, but none of what has happened has driven it out of me, just provided an object lesson in the value of caution."

Simon idly reached up to stroke a hand through the edges of River's hair in a comforting way. "Well, we'll see what we can do. Maybe we'll be able to get you some good books, or a self-contained educational computer system, so that you can learn without leaving the ship - and the rest of us."

"Maybe this is an unfair question," Kaylee put in. "But if you knew that Serenity was where you belonged for so long, why didn't you... um, I mean, say something to try and smooth things over when - um, when Simon and Mal..."

"I wasn't exactly good at 'smooth', back then," River joked, and even Simon had to laugh at that line. "And... well, I was worried about some of you being hurt when the Alliance finally caught up to me. Of course, even I couldn't have guessed what would really end up happening."

"What kind of job brought you to Beylix, Mal?" Simon asked, and he and Zoe started telling the story, which involved the smuggling of high-quality seed grains, and an almost absurdly complicated dog-and-pony show that developed, bit by bit, out of an effort to persuade the lackeys of a local crime lord that they were just performers out to entertain the folk of a poor moon village and collect whatever gifts the locals could offer them.

Zoe and most of the others went down into the cargo bay to swap more stories after dinner was finished, (including vacuum-packed pudding substitute for dessert,) but Mal stayed behind, cleaning some dishes off the table. Inara stood up and went over to him.

"Forget that for now - you owe me a drink, remember? Any notion what's the best place to not be disturbed??"

Even though he should have expected that, Mal nearly dropped a few plates. Inara was looking much more like her usual self, though not completely elegant perhaps - her hair was curled out and pinned up into one of those waterfall 'dos in back, and she was absolutely the lady in red - a thick red skirt that almost reached her knees, a red shirt with short sleeves, a shallow scoop neckline and about two inches of bare stomach showing all the way around. Oh, and also pale rose-red slippers of the sort she often liked to wear.

Mal shook his head and tried to evaluate possible venues for this encounter. The shuttle? No, he wouldn't feel too comfortable there, even if all of her furnishings that made that vessel Inara's space had been taken down - and if she had refused to move back in, maybe she wouldn't like it either. Her room? Possible, but a bit presumptuous, and they'd have to slip through the back of the cargo deck, at least, without being seen - at least, Mal wasn't sure that he wanted all of his friends to see what might be happening.

The ship did not have that many good locations for such a rendezvous, and so after a moment, Mal decided to gamble. After all, he did want to send a strong signal to Inara, and this might do. "Howsabout my bunk? I do have a bottle of Sihnon Maotai Baijiu hidden away in a secret compartment. Might be a little taste of home for you."

"Well, that I did not expect," Inara admitted, walking over with a subtle sway to her hips that Mal couldn't help but be hyper-aware of. (Was she doing it intentionally for his benefit, or was that just the mood of the evening amplifying the way Inara usually moved?) "Come on, let's make our getaway before anybody else comes back up." Mal grinned. Inara reached out to pick up a few packages from the kitchen counter. "Snacks to go with the drinks."

"Okay, alright." Mal led the way up into the forwards hall and pushed the angled metal plate aside revealing the ladder down into his quarters. "After you, m'lady??"

"Really?" She made a cute face at him. "So you don't want to be beneath me on the ladder and sneak a look up my skirt?" Mal sighed. "Of course, this way offers some peeking opportunities too, I guess." She started to climb down, and Mal tried to avoid looking down the neckline of her top as it sank through the best viewing angles. He mostly managed to keep his willpower in good shape, at that.

Once they were both down in the bunk, with the entrance closed again, Mal could fend off the bothersome sensation of bugs in his shoes by distracting himself with retrieving the bottle from its hiding spot, (which Inara was watching for curiously,) pouring two small glasses, and putting each one in the little cheap flash-freezer that he had picked up back on Greenleaf, hoping that it wouldn't blow one of its microfuses. Once all of that was done, he felt much less nervous.

"Okay, so what shall we toast to?" Inara asked, taking her glass when he offered it, and sitting on the bed right next to him, her leg pressing against his. Mal tried to speak, but couldn't think of anything to say, gorram it. "Okay... to the majestic night that is eternal between the worlds, and the simple joys of finding a safe place to land for a while."

Mal thought about that, and a smile spread across his face. "Sounds pretty nice." They clinked glasses, and drank, and the chilled clear liquor seemed to freeze and burn his throat at once as it went down.

"Okay, so, your turn to tell me what I missed first," Inara insisted.

"No," he protested. "That... that's not really why we're here, is it? I mean..." Mal struggled to think, and having Inara so close to him was making that harder than the drink did, as near as he could reckon. "What we've both been missing, neither of us really knows yet, and telling stories isn't going to help us figure it out."

"Maybe," Inara said. "But there'll be time for that later." She took another long sip. "When we're both drunked-er, yep. Stories first!"

Mal considered that plan, and couldn't see anything wrong with it. "Well, let's see... Mingo Rample, he shows up in the middle of clear deep space between Beaumonde and Georgia, saying that he's got a sweet deal that any other crew would kill for, and he wants to give us first crack at it..."

-----------

Kaylee yawned sleepily, and nudged Simon, who was lying next to her in the narrow space afforded them by her single bunk. "Okay, let's do it. Let's move you in here, tomorrow."

There was no reply from Simon for a long moment, and she wondered if he'd already drifted off into sleepland and hadn't even heard what she'd said. "Why tomorrow? Might be busy, what with getting ready to make planetfall and all."

"Nothing too big's up," she added idly. "Serenity's engines are all ready for the drop, and we don't have any cargo to prep - except Jayne's rail gun I s'pose."

"Don't let him hear you call it his," Simon warned, and Kaylee laughed in reply. "Hmm, I wonder who else is up?"

"Mal or Jayne, I think," Kayle replied, after cocking her head at the sound from outside her small room. "No big."

"Actually, I was thinking that once we got to Boros, maybe I could take you to stay somewhere else."

"Like what, a hotel?" She sighed. "I dunno, I'm used to bunking down at Serenity even when we're landed. And any hotel nicer than here would be REALLY pricey..."

"Which is part of the fun," Simon said, laughing. "Well, it was just a thought."

"Hmm - well, maybe," Kaylee said. "Just for a little while - so we can get away and hardly even leave the room, if you pay so much for it." Simon chuckled appreciatively about that.

"By the way, why did you decide on here?" Simon added after a moment. "River will be disappointed."

"Oh, I guess I knew as soon as you brought it up that I didn't want to be the one to move," she said, "but I wasn't sure about sayin' that straight out." She sighed. "Part of it is, in a weird way, I never really thought of this bunk as somethin' that was mine, from the start. Maybe because I spent so much time in the engine room, even sleepin' in the hammock there a lot of nights, close enough to reach out and touch the side of the stator if I felt like it. But..." She took a deep breath. "You remember the first time we - we were here together? After the fight at Mister Universe's place, limpin' back to Haven to... to put Wash an' him to rest next to the Shepard..."

"Yes, of course I remember," Simon assured her. "Felt a little uncomfortable about what we were sneaking off to do, but - but between those terse words we'd said to each other right before the shooting started, and the impulse to affirm life and passion after all of that death, there was no way to resist it..."

"Yeah, I felt the same way," she agreed. "But - but after, you were holding me, just like this, and strangely enough it occured to me that - that maybe the reason this bunk never felt like mine was that it was waitin' to be OURS. I hadn't really thought about you moving in here for good, at that point - I didn't know how much more you wanted than to be with me once, and that woulda been enough - or it would've been if you hadn't been so damn good at this..."

Simon chuckled. "Okay, well... that's a sweet notion, and I like the thought of making this 'our' bunk, too. So if you want, I'll start moving my stuff in tomorrow." He considered, and shifted himself around. "Might want to see if we can arrange for a slightly wider mattress, though."

"Oh, what's wrong?" Kayle turned and pressed her naked self tightly against him. "You don't like being squeezed this close to me?"

"Not when you're in this mood, no I don't," he admitted, and started to let his fingers over everry part of her skin that they could reach. Kaylee wondered to himself whether it was really anything to do with Simon being a surgeon, that he had such talented hands.

------------

This time, when Jayne came up to the cockpit in the middle of Serenity's night shift, he saw someone much shorter, sknnier, and busier in the pilot's seat. "Oh, hello River. How's the course going?"

"Easy enough," River mentioned offhandedly. "Simple elliptical approach to Boros, nothing to it. I was just entertaining myself by working out a hypothetical route to Higgins' moon in under twelve days."

"Fay-fay duh pee-yen," Jayne opined succintly. "There's no way that we could - well, not on our available fuel, at least..."

"Nah, it's doable," she assured him qucikly. "You have to cut through the center of the system at unsafe relative velocities, and pull a kind of a slingshot maneuver to save fuel on the deccel side, but I've got it down to eleven days, ten hours, and a few-odd minutes. Wanna see?" She moved aside from the computerized flight console, where a very rough diagram of a trajectory was displayed in various flat perspectives.

"Ehh, I can never make much sense of those things," Javne muttered. He could make out well enough that the yellow line connected Serenity's present position with a large planetary system on the other side of the sun, but if there was any clear way to interpret how long it would take or how much power was required to drive it, they were just geek to him. He did realize that not many of the course graphics that he'd ever seen cut through the heart of the system so directly, as far as that went. "Sometime if we actually get a chance to try a course like that, maybe I'll believe. I'd kinda like to see my town again, if the coast is clear."

"Okay, I'll call that a rain check," River replied. "So, it's a pretty quiet night, huh. Zoe's finally getting some decent sleep."

"How... how did you figure - oh." Jayne sighed. "Guess it's a bit of a foolish question to ask Reader-girl."

"I'd rather you didn't call me that," River said. Jayne shot her an odd look. "For one thing, I don't think my telepathic abilities are terribly advanced. Obviously, I've got something - there's no other way to expalin how I knew about the Miranda thing, after all. But I've always been highly intuitive, and there are strong indications that Alliance authorities have been able to impart exceptional skills in the interpretation of body language and tone of voice which can yield results capable of fooling the standardized parapsychology tests for..."

"Okay, okay," Jayne grunted. "I... I won't say it anymore if you stop yattering at me like you just did!!"

"That's why I did it," she said smugly.

"Hmm, what's that?" Jayne asked. River shrugged at him. "Somebody out in the corridor I guess. Heading aft." He shrugged.

"So, what does it feel like to be the odd guy out?" River asked after a moment.

"Whatchoo mean by that?"

"Well, there's only three of you men left on the ship," River started. "You, my brother - and Mal. Simon and Kaylee are a thing, and I think that Mal and Inara are finally trying to sort it out."

"What, really?" Jayne snorted. "Captain Independent and her ladyship?? I mean, she's pretty enough, I doubt that any man wouldn't have thought of it, but... come on, they're just too different. He's dirt-poor and she's a - well..."

"Bureaucrats of the heavens above," River swore in a very old Mandarin oath. "Only as big a putz as you could possibly have missed spotting the sexual tension oozing and glurping around between them. I spotted it the first time I saw them in the same room." Jayne looked pointedly at her. "And so have plenty of other people who don't have special perceptive powers, as far as that goes."

"Hmm." Jayne still felt uncertain about accepting what River was saying. "Well, be that as it may - I'm not sure how it affects me. Never really been one to go lookin' for tail... er, I mean, for companionship of the womanly persuasion..." River laughed out loud at the fact that Jayne had felt he had to rephrase himself. "Err, in the team where I work and make my livin'." Reconsidered that. "Not that I was often on a crew with any gals on, before this."

"No interest at all, then?"

"Well... I was actually telling Zoe the other night that I wouldn't have minded having a shot with Kaylee, but as you say, that doesn't seem like to happen right now. No real interest in pursuing Inara, even if what you said about Mal were off in left field."

"And then - well, Zoe's quite a lot of woman herself... probably don't want to give her the idea before she reckons she's ready, but..."

"Oh, you're interested in her?" River checked the console one more time and stood up. "Well, maybe I should make a move of my own if I don't want to be the old girl out." And with a look on her face that Jayne was pretty sure that he'd never seen before, she stepped towards him.

All of a sudden he felt nervous. "What... what exactly would you be meaning by that, little girl?"

"I'm not THAT little a girl," River insisted. "I... I'm old enough to know my own mind, make my own choices... and there's no denying that you're pretty handsome and all muscular, Cobb." She stopped right in front of him, only inches between them. "What with one thing and another going on lately, is it so surprising that I feel curious enough to try getting some, umm, first hand experience??"

"Oh, I get it," Jayne declared a bit too loudly. "You been spying on your big brother and Kaylee - we all knowed that much. Didn't figure it'd get you quite this riled up, and... and you figure that I'm the only available guy to start experimenting with??"

"Well, it's not JUST about my brother," River insisted, "but there's some truth to that." She backed away slightly to strike a pose. "Am I not sexy enough to meet your standards for a tumble partner?"

The denial that Jayne had been about to make automatically got pretty well stuck in his throat. Young River Tam, (and it was true, she wasn't a child anymore, hadn't really been even when she first woke up in the cargo bay, but the craziness had made her seem more childish,) was definitely a pretty sight at the moment. She had started to give up her traditional dresses and skirts after the epiphanies of Miranda, and was wearing some kind of tight, stretchy dark blue trousers, along with a looser floppy ice-green tee shirt that was thin enough to just hint at the slender feminine figure underneath instead of make it completely obvious. Between that, Rivers long dark hair, her compelling brown eyes, and the quiet symmetry of her face, Jayne felt an impact like a kick to the center of his chest. She wasn't a bit like the ladies he tended to seek out when he had a chance to - but there was something bewitching about River now that she was concentrating on making an impression.

As if she could tell the silent decision he'd come to, (and, of course, she probably could,) River slunk close again. Eagerly, one small hand pressed against the front of Jayne's pants, where a beast was beginning to stir with its approval. "Mmmm, nice man parts. Jayne definitely ain't a girl."

A smile finally broke out across Jayne's face. After checking the cockpit door to make sure that nobody else was about to come in, he blurted out, "You show me yours and I'll show you mine?"

River apparently had to mull over that for a long time, and then sighed. "We were doing so well, and then you had to go and ruin it all, Cobb. If I was six, I'd have been all over playing doctor with you. But I'm eighteen now, so you're going to have to grow up a bit if you're really interested." And she turned around and exited the room, leaving behind a fairly puzzled Jayne Cobb.

----------

Mal came to and figured out that he was sprawled out on his bed, still about half dressed in the clothes he'd been wearing yesterday, feeling very dry and thirsty, a little queasy in his guts, and without much energy. Yeah, that would be the Maotai. He made an effort to look around, found that he couldn't see much in the darkness, flipped on a light and had to shut his eyes against the sudden brightness. Finally got the dimmer set to what seemed like an appropriate level, and located the bottle. More than three-quarters gone, and from the way Mal felt, he probably had at least half of it. Which would seem to indicate, if he had done his math right, that Inara wouldn't be feeling as lousy as he would at this point.

Inara, right - he'd been drinking with her, and swapping stories. That was the last thing that Mal had forgotten, and he swore under his breath against the smooth and beguiling liquor, whether it had managed to forestall the much hoped for conclusion of the evening, or simply blotted out his memories of what had happened. Inara herself, quite obviously, was no longer within Mal's room, and the only obvious evidence of her presence were the apparently empty snack bags sitting on the dresser top. Crunchy rice puff treats and Blue Sun Irresistable Prenguhl snacks, a kind of flat algae disc that tasted vaguely potato-like. Groaning, Mal downed a bit of distilled water, stripped, scrubbed himself a little bit closer to clean, threw on some fresh clothes, and headed up the ladder to see what was going on. He noticed just before leaving the room that the chronometer at his bedside read 0720 ship's time - pretty early, but he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep yet anyway.

Mal took a look in the cockpit - nobody around, though things seemed to be all going alright there, and as he headed back through the forward hall Kaylee climbed up out of her own room, nodded a 'good morning' to him, and headed back towards the engine room with a purposeful air. Probably she wanted to check on something to do with the landing today - she'd better make sure that NOTHING would fall off the gorram ship while they were flying through atmo this time...

Zoe was in the mess, spooning dry wheatie-squares into her mouth with a grim determination, and sparing him one brief and grim look. Jayne was down in the cargo bay when Mal tried there, pressing bench with a truly astounding collection of weights added to the bar, looking like he had all the frustration in the 'verse to work off on his exercising.

As he headed across the bay, Mal realized with an odd sensation that a small part of him deep down was looking for Wash - a part down deep enough that it hadn't yet learned that Wash wasn't to be found. Kaylee had been helpful with the actual advice earlier, but this was a time when Mal would rather have the sympathies of another male than get insights into the female psyche. Jayne would never be someone in whom Mal could confide about his love life, partly because he'd only see sex instead of anything else passing between two people. And though Simon was a mighty decent fellow, Mal had never really been able to understand him on a particularly deep level, so that was out too.

He'd never tried talking on this sort of thing with Wash, but he would have been Mal's choice now that he had something to say. Beneath his joking exterior, Wash understood this kind of thing - that was part of what Zoe had seen in him, he knew. And though he never much thought about it, going through torture together had established some kind of bond between them...

"Oh, what the gorram hell," Mal muttered, and headed towards Inara's room once again. Might as well get whatever it was over with quickly.

He had to knock twice before she answered, (had to stop himself from just barging in too,) and when Mal opened the door, Inara was standing still in the middle of the small room. "I was meditating," she said, telling him a simple piece of information.

Mal thought about that. "Aren't ya supposed to sit cross-legged when you meditate?"

"Okay, if you're so smart, then tell me - have you ever tried to sit cross-legged in a skirt like this?" She had a point. The black sheath surrounding Inara's legs almost all the way to her ankles was narrow enough that Mal suspected he'd be surprised at how well she'd be able to walk in it, or something like that. Over that she was wearing a kind of purple cloak or robe that fell just a little way past her hips, and her hair was straight behind her today.

"I suppose that's a point." Why she hadn't worn other clothes for meditating was a question Mal decided not to bring up. "Umm, well, I guess you're wondering why I was here." Inara nodded calmly. "Just sort of wondering what happened last night, actually..."

Inara opened her mouth and seemed about to say something to him with a bit of vehemence, but then she stopped without actually starting, and gave him a very long, pensive glance, her gaze sweeping Mal up and down. "You... you mean that literally, right? Drank enough that you can't remember too much?"

"I remember a fair bit, but not the end," Mal admitted. He looked over at a small chair in the room, and Inara nodded princessly permission back. "Dinner, a'course, and heading off to my bunk together. The start of the drinkin', some snacks, and plenty of tales told. But..."

"But not either how you passed out or when I left?" Inara filled in. Mal nodded. "There's not too much to that, I suppose. You were already out of it when I headed off. Wasn't any fun after that, you know."

"And you didn't undress me to get me more comfortable?" Inara shook her head. "Then who took my shirt off??"

"Well, you did, of course." Mal raised his eyebrows at that. "Not specifically for my benefit, though I might have taken advantage of that a little before you went all unconscious on me." Inara sighed. "Bottom lime - neither of us said much to compromise ourselves. Admitted some mutual lust, and we kissed - that was about it."

"Hmm." Mal fought off a bit of a wave of disappointment that he'd kissed Inara and didn't even remember it. "So you kiss me, and then I pass out. That's starting to seem a bit familiar - are you sure that..."

"Oh, that is just too rich, coming from you!!" Inara snapped, sounding really upset.

"What... what do you mean by that?"

"Umm... that it's time to come clean about that sequence I guess. NO, Saffron did not kiss me. Can you work out how else I ended up passing out in your quarters, on that occasion?"

"Huh?" Mal frowned at the sudden declaration. "Umm... okay, well... you didn't get your head knocked hard or anything, right?" Inara murmured a 'no' of agreement. "And, well... I don't imagine that you accidentally put her goodnight kiss stuff on without being prepared for it or something..."

"Not really, no - not directly from her source, I mean."

Mal thought hard. "Did... did you get tagged secondhand, from me?" Inara managed to shake her head, shrug, smile, and nod all at once, and surprisingly it wasn't a confusingly mixed signal. "Umm - just how did that happen, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Well... I was with - with Saffron when Zoe sounded the alarm," Inara said softly. "Won't go into a lot of details at that point, but she called herself as 'Mal Reynolds' widow.'" Some sort of surprise must have been clear from Mal's face. "Yeah. I... I don't think that she really believed that she'd killed you - she said it to upset me, and that worked all too well. After a little bit of scrapping we split up - she went for the spare shuttle to getaway, and I... I looked for you and quickly found you, crumpled up on the floor of your room, looking VERY dead."

Mal waited a moment, and then said, "Go on."

"Well... I was so afraid for you, but automatically I managed to rush over and check you. There was breath in your chest and a pulse beating in your neck. Ragged but strong - very much like you yourself." Mal chuckled. "So overcome with relief, I impulsively kissed your lips, as if you were the slumbering lovely and would awake from the touch of my lips. And then I called for help, for the doctor."

"And then you realized that it would work the other way around," Mal guessed. "That kissing me would send you to sleep too."

"Yes," she agreed. "There's a moment when you can realize that something is wrong." Mal nodded. "You caught that too? I... I realized what she must have done, and I... I called you a rather rude thing in the moment before I collapsed bect to you, I'm afraid..." That sentence made Mal burst out laughing.

"I only wish I'd had the presence of mind to cuss HER out before I went. Yo-Saff-Bridge I mean. I... I tried to draw on her, but I never stood a chance of that."

"Yeah, I guess not," Inara said. "I mean... most people probably couldn't shoot in that space of time, even if they knew what was happening to them. You went with your instincts in that moment, I guess."

"Hmm." Mal considered. "And... and Simon found you there, and you fed him the bumped head line when he brought you round?" Inara nodded. "And since you'd had a secondhand dose, it took less time for you to wake up?"

"Umm... something like that," Inara said.

"One thing I must admit I'm curious about," Mal said, "And this is not to be taken as a criticism in any way - after that little scuffle you mentioned, did you let Saff go because you were worried about my own self?"

"I... I thought that we were well rid of her!" Inara flared. "It didn't occur to me that we might need to capture her - that she'd have disabled the steering and all. And - and I don't think that I could have restrained her if I'd tried - she pretty much had the edge on me at hand to hand..."

"Hey, it's okay," Mal insisted, as Inara carefully sat on the edge of the bed. "As I said, it was just an idle wonder - not placing any blame." He reached out for Inara's hand, and she offered it for him to hold, "Well - drinking maotai doesn't seem to have done that well as far as sorting out our unsettled affairs."

"Well, it broke the ice," Inara pointed out, possibly just because she wanted to be contrary. "More than anything else has managed to do, I think. Maybe we can try again on Boros or somethi--"

Just at that point, the scene was interrupted by a tinny voice from the vicinity of the infirmary area - an old tannoy speaker. "Hey, Captain Mal, you'd better get up here - somebody from Boros orbital control is asking for you."

Mal stood up and sighed softly. "Hold that thought."

----------

In the mid-afternoon of ship's time, Mal waited near the cargo bay airlock and cast his mind back over the events of the day since his talk with Inara early in the morning. There wasn't much to stand out against the tedium of a fairly dull day in space. Simon had pestered him into helping move some stuff down into Kaylee's bunk, and that task had apparently been keeping him busy all through the lunch hour. Jayne had been very busy as well, exercising, going over the rail gun and examining its parts in minute detail for what reason Mal wasn't sure he wanted to know - and then disappearing into his bunk. Zoe's black mood hadn't lifted all day - maybe that was because the impending landing had reminded her of who wouldn't be guiding the ship safely back down to surface.

Apparently Boros' sudden re-embrace of Independence principles hadn't extended to abandoning the elaborate Alliance orbital control network, but Mal was very nervous about the news that an inspector would be docking with them before they would be allowed to land. They couldn't be doing this to every ship now, could they? Either answer, that yes they were being so paranoid, or that their vessel had been picked out for special attention, made him feel equally queasy. (It was the same feeling he'd had from the Maotai when he woke up - hmmm...)

Even though it was what he was waiting for and brooding over, the soft clang of another ship docking at the airlock surprised him. When the doors opened, he could see a small one-person ship beyond, and a young pup in a brown uniform waiting silently for permission to come aboard. "Alright, what's this about?" Mal asked gruffly.

"A message that couldn't be sent across on a wave," the other ship's pilot said, stepping nervously across. "Mal Reynolds? I'm Deputy Zeffen, of the new Boros Provisional authority. Although the public is still unaware, we have access Alliance information to the effect that you were responsible for... for the signal."

Mal smiled a little bit tightly. "And why haven't 'you' released that information to your adoring public? Wouldn't they like to know?"

"Umm... there were reasons to be cautious about such an announcement, sir. Even many who have joined in action against the Alliance of Worlds might have reasons to be angry enough at the disruption of the status quo to, umm, to shoot the messengers. And then, there are still those who might secretly harbour allegience to the old Parliament still..."

"Yes, that makes sense," Mal agreed evenly. He'd worked that much out for himself. "Okay, so we'll keep mum about our part in the revolution - I'll insist on that, though some of my crew might wish to tell a few who could be trusted with discretion. Is there anything else?"

"Not for your gallant crew, Reynolds, however, the Co-ordinator authority would like to speak with you in person. Is this acceptable?"

"Umm... I suppose, so," Mal said, wondering what that would be about. "We've been through a lot over the past few weeks..."

"Understood. Land your vessel at the Assama city-center port. A credit fund has been arranged as a token of our esteem." He passed over a small magnetic tile. "This concludes my business here."

Mal was so confused by this point that he didn't even see Zeffen leave.

-----------

"Wow," Kaylee breathed as they stepped off of Serenity's ramp to the small landing field surrounded by city buildings. "Never thought I'd be standing in here..." They had been to Assama city, of course - but landing at the much larger spaceport on the edge of the city limits. "Oh, hello?" A girl with pale hair, around River's age, had stepped up to them.

"Captain Reynolds?" Mal waved vaguely at her. "If you'll follow me to the Admin building, please."

"Alright I s'pose." Mal looked around at the group for a moment, and his gaze settled on Kaylee. "Here you go." He passed over a small flat square to her. "Have a good time, and be careful." With that, he hurried away after the gofer-girl. Inara raised one eyebrow at the choice of messenger that Boros admin had sent.

"Credit tile?" Kaylee muttered, turning to Simon and lifting the object in question. "Wonder where this came from."

"Try it in the terminal over there," Simon said, pointing at a small kiosk machine beside the arch that led out of the field. So she did, and the rest of the group that remained clustered around her. Zoe hadn't left the ship - maybe Mal would have entrusted the tile to her if she had.

"Government issue, it says," Kaylee read, mystified. "Nothing else."

"Canya get me some cash?" Jayne asked. "I'd like to strike out on my own for a bit."

"Umm, sure." Getting paper money seemed like a good deal. If Mal hadn't told them where the tile had come from, then probably it would be better not to flash it too many places. Using cash wouldn't attract as much attention - apparently even though Boros was rebelling from the Alliance parliament, they were in no hurry to get rid of Alliance money, which underpinned the economy structure at this point. After a moment, she had the tile back and a surprisingly thick sheaf of bills, each with a tiny nanocircuit built in to prove its authenticity.

"Oooh!" Just before Jayne managed to snatch away most of the wad of cash, Kaylee managed to pull it back, extracted a few of the higher denominations which seemed like most of a fair share, and offered them to him. Jayne considered just a moment, then grabbed what he'd been offered and hurried out, to join the crew. Kaylee turned to Inara and River.

"I... I'm good - I don't need any of Boros' money," Inara said softly. "Time to check in at the local guild headquarters."

"Okay," Simon said.

"And... and I'm none too eager to go out exploring by myself," River admitted, looking around at the crowds. "Especially considering the kind of trouble I sometimes get into. D'you mind?"

"You wanna tag along with us?" Kaylee said, and shot a look at Simon, who was trying not to smile too wide. River was a good friend, and one of her brother's two favorite people in the 'verse, and nobody seemed to mind the notion of staying together in a group of three, though Kaylee did hope that at some point she'd be able to spend some romantic time in the city alone with Simon. They walked out into the street, after Kaylee had taken one last fond look back at Serenity.

"Okay, where to?" Simon asked after a moment. "We've got enough money that we don't need to worry about - making my pickup. I don't feel that hungry yet..."

"No, me neither," Kaylee said. "And it's a bit earlier in the day here than it was ship's time." That was definitely true. Kaylee's wrist chrono read 1752, but here it was still midafternoon, and the city streets looked busy and cheerful. "We can find someplace to grab some eats and maybe a brew when evening starts to come on."

"Sounds good to me," River agreed. "Just explore until then?"

"Or shop," Simon said, smiling a little smile.

"Ahh, not yet honey," Kaylee told him. "I can go looking for spare parts in the morning."

"I wasn't talking about buying spare parts," Simon insisted, and pointed at a small boutique across the groundcar avenue and down the sidewalk. "Was wondering if the prettiest girl in the whole 'verse wanted to try on some pretty things."

Kaylee's face lit up, speechless with wonder. "Oh, you bet I do!!" River enthused, and dashed out into the street, nimbly ducking through a gap in the traffic.

"Oh, come on!" Simon called after his sister, trying to follow her, and then looking for a safe-walking indicator.

TO BE CONTINUED...


	3. Chapter 3

Part Three

(Disclaimer: the song lyrics are by Leahy, off the album 'In High Places,' not written by me.)

"It's late and it's getting dark..." Simon started.

"So quit complaining, and hurry up!" River insisted. Simon growled under his breath.

"Come on, sweetie," Kaylee said, swinging herself and Simon around so that she could aim those pretty eyes of hers straight at him. "I... I think that we're close. I know I've said that before, but River thinks that it's right down there too. The girls at the store really recommended this place for down-home cooking and good hospitality, so... it's just a little bit further, right? And if we can't find it there, then we'll just go to the next cafe we see, which won't be far, since as you've pointed out, there seems to be one on every other street corner. Alright?"

"Umm..." Simon drew in breath to agree with her, when from down the street River called out 'I found it!' and kinduv made the whole thing academic. Kaylee laughed out loud and held his arm close to her as they caught up. Simon hadn't even noticed his irepressible sister running on ahead.

When he got his first look inside the Mellow Moose, Simon decided that it was possibly a bit too down-home for his tastes - but maybe he shouldn't be quite so judgemental. After all, the Canton tavern on Higgins' moon had definitely been even more - well, rustic than this place, but even there he'd enjoyed himself some - once he'd loosened up some and done his best to take things as they came. And... and it had been one of the first times he'd really gotten to spend some time alone with Kaylee and realize how much he liked her - though even that, he'd manage to mess up more than a bit through sheer idiocy...

And he realized that he was the only one standing out on the street and looking through the door, and hurried inside to find his girls.

"Gosh... I actually feel overdressed around here," Kaylee said as he got close. She and River were sitting at one end of a long table - there were other people around, but none terribly close to them, and Simon was disappointed that River had taken the chair next to Kaylee because he'd wanted to be ablt to take her hand in his or touch her arm. But sitting across the table where he could stare at her had its upside as well.

It was definitely true that all three of them were dressed up to the nines, and that did make them stick out pretty far among the simple clothes of the roadhouse staff and most of the customers. Kaylee had eventually settled on a short blue skirt and a long-sleeved, high-necked white sweater, with a kind of glitter and shine to its fabric. River was in an expensive blue-gray dress with a shallow v-neck, a slit in the front of the skirt, shiny little stones sewn into the trimming, and two chiffon-ey trains trailing behind her. Kaylee had persuaded Simon to get something as well, but he'd settled for a new shirt, in a shade of blue that she said was flattering. They'd all been carrying bags of old clothes, and a few other things that the girls had insisted on picking up...

"Okay, I think that we leave something to mark our seats, and head up there to get food," River said, pointing to one of the walls of the room, where a number of customers were waiting in line. Simon hadn't even wondered if they would have wait staff at the table at a place like this yet. So he draped a jacket over the back of his chair, and the bags were used as placeholders as well - Simon tried not to worry that someone would simply make off with them. Hopefully their tablemates wouldn't allow such a thing.

"Okay, so you've got that 'pickup' to make tomorrow," River said to Simon as they waited in line. "What? I didn't... it was hard not to hear you two talking about it - and I don't know what it is you're getting, really I don't. If you don't want me there, then I'm nowhere near."

"Well... we'll see," Simon said, sighing slightly. Having a telepathic, brilliant, slightly unbalanced, immensely talented bratty younger sister was something that Simon had to admit might drive him to premature gray hairs. "Umm... do you want to head back to the ship once we're done here tonight, Kaylee? I mean - for the night?"

"Hmm? Ohh... yeah, I'd rather just be in our room, I admit." River rolled her eyes up to a startling degree when Kaylee said that, so much so that it looked like she'd be able to examine the contents of her own frontal lobe. "And I'm not even really planning for tomorrow, I admit - just looking forward to tonight. Oooh... lemme see." The line in front of them was moving fairly quickly, and Kaylee had just spotted a sign indicating the 'Table doat price.' "What's a doat, anyway?"

"It's a corruption of Table d'hote, in french," River said boredly. "Meaning that you have limited choices and a fixed price for the meal." Kaylee put down one fifty-credit note for all three of them, and was told in a very bored tone that they didn't give change.

"Umm, that's fine." Each of them got a small bunch of tickets that were good for various courses of the Table doat meal. Appetizer was a salad that looked fake, but a pretty well-done imitation, small bowl of dumpling soup, and a few crunchy breaded things. "Well, looks like the courses are plentiful and the portions are pretty big," Kaylee commented as they finished picking out beverages and maneuvered their trays back towards the table. By the time they'd returned to their seats, it was pretty clear that they had new neighbors.

"Hello darlin," an older, brown-skinned man in an extremely fuzzy blue sweater said as River started to settle next to her. "You doin' okay there? Alright - just let me know if you need more room, or to pass a bottle of the hot sauce or anything."

"Is there salad dressing?" Kaylee asked, and this request was passed further up the table.

"Hi there," a little boy, possibly the grandson of River's neighbor, said to Simon. "You and your girlfriends are dressed so fancy - are you from off-planet?"

River and Kaylee both erupted into giggles. "Umm, yes, we're all visiting Boros, but only, erm, the girl straight opposite me is my girlfriend," Simon quickly disclaimed. It was only afterward that he realized that this was the first time he'd used that term in talking to a stranger - in fact, it might have been - no, he'd said it to Kaylee herself when they were alone, but not to any of the rest of the group. "The girl who's sitting across from you is... is River, and she's my little sister. Do you have a sister here?" Simon guessed he knew the answer, since there were a couple of little girls around the same age further down the table, but he thought it was nice to ask.

"Yeah. Does having a sister get any less annoying when you grow up?"

Simon wasn't quite sure how to answer that question.

-----------

The first few courses were finished in proper succession, (after the starters came a fisherman's pie, and then a slab of meat along with bread and a bowl of mixed boiled vegetables. The Devaran clan, who were their neighbors up the table, were very friendly - they all lived in the outskirts of the city, and several of them worked in the local hydroponic works. All of the children, especially, had lots of questions about space travel and other worlds, which the Firefly-ers answered as best they could.

Just as Simon and Kaylee were about to go back up for pudding, River gasped and pointed over Simon's shoulder. He turned around, squinted through the crowd, and gasped. "Garcia! What's he doing here?"

"I... I'm not sure yet," River muttered.

"And... and how did you know that was him?" Simon asked. "You never met him - right?" But River didn't answer, and Simon realized that she could have seen the man's face in his mind.

"What - who is that, Simon?" Kaylee asked. "And where is he?? I'm not sure which guy you're talking about."

"Umm... he's standing next to the wall, beside the window with the, umm, with the trapped fox design on it." Kayle made a disappointed sign with reference to the stained glass pattern he had referred to. All of the windows were in elaborate colored designs of rough outdoor living, hunting and portaging and so forth. "He... he was one of the people who - who helped me get into the academy and sneak River out." Simon leaned forward close to Kaylee to whisper this much, which meant that he couldn't keep his eyes on Garcia. "The first one who I met - or maybe I should say he met me."

"Oh." Kaylee considered that. "I... I thought you said that it was those other people who got River out."

"I... I didn't want to incriminate myself in too much, back then - just in case," Simon admitted. The exact story of how River's escape had been effected hadn't been the business of Serenity's crew at the time, he'd thought. "And... and he actually helped us all once - on Ariel."

"Ohh." Simon knew that Kaylee was putting the pieces of that cryptic statement together - the faked documents that Simon had used to put together a hospital theft in Saint Lucy's. "But why would he be here on Boros - and coming right towards our table..."

"I... hello," Garcia said to River, who waved at him as he headed between their table and the one that was next over on Simon's side. "Have... have we met? Your face does look familiar, but..."

"Not exactly, but you do know me," Simon said, turning around and offering Garcia a hand. "Hi there Garcia."

"Well, of all the little moons... Simon Tam!" Garcia shook, and turned back to River for a moment. "You must be Simon's precious little sister - I've seen pictures, but they didn't do you justice." He took a half-step back to look at the table. "And who's your lovely friend?"

"Umm - Jose Garcia, Kaylee Frye, chief engineer of the transport 'Serenity,'" Simon said. "She and I, umm..."

"Oh, right, I'd heard that you'd taken a post as medic on a little transport ship," Garcia replied affably. Nobody, of course, was saying much that would indicate that this was anything but an everyday meeting of long-lost acquaintances. "The two of you make a cute couple - congratulations."

"Erm, thanks," Kaylee said. "Nice to meet you - and what brings you to Boros now?"

Garcia hesitated, looking at River and Simon. "Umm... well, that's quite a long and interesting story, but I suppose it'd bear telling to the three of you. Not here, though - I wouldn't want to hold up your dinner."

"Well... I, I guess that you could come by our ship in the morning - that'd be okay, right?" Simon looked at the girls, who nodded. "We're docked at the city center."

"Whoo." Garcia whistled. "Well, you'll need to leave my name with the guard - they don't let just anybody into the yard there."

"Of course," Kaylee said. "Bill Garcia, right?" Garcia nodded.

"And maybe you'll be able to tell me a little of what got you into the high-priority parking lot," he said. Nodded, waved, blew a kiss to the girls with a grin, and headed off.

"Hmm," Simon said, wondering exactly what Garcia's story was all about. Something to do with the covert anti-Alliance stuff he had been involved in before? That might have something to do with why he thought he could trust Simon and River, and their friend, with it - and why he wouldn't want to talk about it in person. Maybe he was delivering secret information to the provisional government, or trying to expose Alliance sympathizers who might start counter-revolutionary groups here.

"Oooh, I know this dance!" Kaylee suddenly exclaimed, rushing around the table and grabbing his arm. Sure enough, some new song was playing and various people were shuffling around, getting ready for a rustic dance in the area bare of furniture next to the dining tables.

"Umm... I'm not so sure I do..."

"Just give it a try," Kaylee impored him, and Simon found himself rising to his feet and taking her arm in his.

"Ooh, dancing!" River excaimed, getting up herself.

"I, uhh, I think it's a couples dance," Simon said hurriedly. "You can't go in by yourself..."

"I'll partner River!" This was Myecki Devaran, the oldest of the third generation, who was thirteen years old and only about two inches shorter than River herself. River waited for him before heading out onto the floor, and Simon couldn't think of another objection. She did love the music and movement of it so much, after all, and nobody seemed to find this arrangement suspicious.

He was never too clear on the patterns and the steps of the dance itself, simply trying to follow Kaylee's lead and more subtle cues - and missing very slightly, more often than not. He had a notion of the overall formation switching from pairs to lines and squares, and then back again. But the music started to tug at his heart and soul - fiddles and other strings, a very battered old upright piano and harmonica and a set of drums that didn't quite fit with the others. And two dark-haired women were singing...

"Coyote plays, and shadows the moon - he's all alone in the midnight air.

He runs like never before, toward the hum and the roar,

Will he find a home and stay?

And all the while, the city sleeps. It won't be long before they take to the streets.

They'll be dripping in things, oh the shine and the ring

Of all the pirated gold, what can be bought can be stole."

Kaylee whipped him around into a furious spin, arm in arm, Simon nearly losing his balance but grinning at the light-headed sensation.

"And on and on Coyote runs, against the hum and roar.

No sight no sound, no sacred ground just people wanting more...

HEY - there's a light out on the horizon, it's shining

Another day, to find another way.Yeah, the moon is high

The tide is out, but it's rising, it's turning again

So take a chance -- be lost or borne away..."

As Simon danced on, saw River and Myecki near to him and Kaylee, he got a sense of an independent passion that he'd never really understood from reading about the war. The struggle between rural energy and the safety of city living, the conflict between the wild thing and the hunter, it all seemed to be tied up into this music.

"Coyote wakes, and runs with the wind.

Heading west he's returning again.

He hits the edge of the town, and then he circles around

Don't know if he will stay."

Briefly there was a switch of partners, so that Simon found himself dancing with his little sister, but soon Kaylee was back.

"And the people sleep, with open eyes.

There's a predator just outside.

You can hear its roar, with the crack of every door

Day and night, he's ready to fight.

And on, and on, the city goes - it's racing more and more.

No sight, no sound,

Just sacred ground can stop its hum and roar."

As the chorus started again, Simon caught Kaylee's eye and whispered thanks - which he couldn't even hear himself over the music. But she grinned, and shook a bit extra to the music, which made her curves vibrate slightly under the sweater and started to make Simon wonder how soon it would be before they could return back to the ship and make love again. A brief instrumental played, fiddles and a pipe that Simon hadn't noticed until this point - lonely and soulful, like the beauty of the desolate plains.

"Run, coyote, run and never never go astray.

It may be night, but dark is light and night is day

Don't change your coat or stain that pretty shade of gray...

And let the world go change your ways...

Be strong: don't give into those shiny, fancy, empty things.

They'll only strip your heart, your mind, your soul, your wings...

Escape the hum, escape the roar now while you can.

Or let your scent be known to man..."

The words suddenly created an odd metaphor in Simon's mind - he was a domesticated dog trying to live among the coyotes, at least for a while. He had been born to the shiny fancy things, but bit by bit he had started to escape those things. And Kaylee - was she wild, or tame herself??

"So go, oh little children, go and don't you be afraid.

Chance the current and the loss, or be borne away.

Take back yourself, take back tonight, take back the day.

And then show the world the way, (show the world the way...)"

As the song ended, many of the dancers were panting with physical and emotional exertion, and a wave of applause broke out for the musicians. "Okay, now I think that we've worked up a good appetite for our dessert," Kayle said in his ear. For a moment, Simon hoped that she was talking about something else, before he followed her back to the table and saw her pick up the little white ticket next to her tray.

"I think that they have iced yogurt," River said, smiling.

----------

Mal was shaking his head and grumbling when he got back to the ship. As he passed through the cargo bay doors, he had even gotten so far as speaking a steady stream of chinese words.

"Meeting with the Boros government went well?"

Mal looked up and saw Inara on the infirmary steps. "Umm... actually no it didn't. Could ya tell?" Inara nodded slightly. "They... they want me to stand for election in two months!!"

"As in, for government office here?" Inara burst out incredulously. Mal didn't even take offense, as that had been pretty much his own reaction. "Well... come to think of it, I suppose I can see a few of their reasons, but..."

"They want to trade on my war history and make a big announcement of my involvement in the broadcast," Mal said bitterly.

"Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant."

"'Once we can protect you, Mister Reynolds, and remaining discreet about any participation from your crew." Mal swore venemently again. "Participation! Wash gave up his life for that go-se broadcast, and all of the rest of us damn well nearly did..."

"And aren't the people here on Boros, including the provisional government, doing more or less what you hoped they would with that information?" Inara asked quietly. Mal looked up at her. "They've rejected Alliance control - rejected the notions of those who would seek to improve them, and trying to go their own way in the Verse. To be an inspiration, maybe, to other worlds that want to break away. I... I can understand if you're frustrated at the real-world necessities involved, but don't lose your faith in what we did because of something like that."

Mal smiled slightly, and headed up the stairs. Inara shrugged and led the way back to her room. "Y... you're right, I should try to not let it spread over. I was just surprised by the suggestion. Don't want to be a figurehead, a symbol to the people of Boros, like that statue of Jayne on Higgins' moon. And - and I'm not the type of man who'd actually be a good administrator and public servant in that fashion, pretty sure."

"Umm... I'm not convinced that you'd be a bad one," Inara mentioned. "And... and a planet never has enough truly good people working in government, I think - even the best systems are filled up mostly with people who are 'more or less good enough.' I... I do think that you'd be more or less good enough - and also that you'd be less happy than most in a position like that. But the final decision has to be your own."

"I... I think that I've already made it," Mal muttered. "I am flattered, in a strange way, and I do wish them the best, but I won't do it." He sighed. "On the other hand, I think that I've learned just enough diplomacy of late to realize that it would be smarter to not give them that answer right away." He looked up at Inara to see what her reaction was. "Make them think I'm considering it, maybe think up the best way of refusing, and give the others a chance to enjoy Boros' hospitality and maybe find some opportunities while we're here."

"That... that does sound like a wise course of action." Inara sighed slightly.

At first Mal wasn't sure that she meant it. And then something belatedly hit him - Inara was concerned with something else - maybe something that she'd found out in the city this evening. "What... is something wrong?"

"Actually, yes. I received some disturbing news - a report has been lodged with the Guild that I was killed on Paquin, during that misadventure with the Operative and his confrontation with you." Mal drew in a breath. "Since nobody witnessed my leaving with you, and I wasn't in contact for so long after, this disinformation has managed to gain some credability. And... and the one time I was able to wave to Paquin, not long before we got to Persephone, the reception wasn't terribly good, so they weren't able to vouch that it was me..."

"And you didn't go back to Paquin," Mal said, seeing how it all fit together. "So the Guild on Boros said that you were an impostor, claiming the true Inara Serra's rights and privileges for your own reasons?"

"They - they wouldn't have been so discourteous as to say it flat out," Inara muttered, sitting down in her room. She looked at her lap and blushed slightly. "But - but my rights and privileges as a guild member, as you say, have been suspended until the matter of my identity can be clearly resolved. Nobody here on Boros' surface knows me well enough to vouch that it is truly me before the Guild."

"And none of us count as witnesses, of course," Mal said.

"Well, the guild doesn't know any of you," she put in with a 'try to be reasonable' tone.

"Alright - I suppose you want to get this resolved as soon as possible?"

"As - as quickly as it's safe to get things straightened out, yes," she assured him. "I... I've had my life in danger before, but it's somewhat disconcerting to be officially dead."

"And what's the best way of doing that?" Mal prompted. "Do - do you need to get back to Paquin, or Sihnon, or..."

"No, it needn't be that far," Inara quickly said. "Turns out that there's an old classmate who I know pretty well on Boros' larger moon - Ares. I can take one of the shuttles there, and meet with Kazia. If everything goes right, I'll be gone for a day at the most."

Mal felt an odd wave of fear travel up his spine. "And - and if things don't go right?" he asked.

"Um - I guess I don't know. Why are you so worried?"

"Well - Ares has an unsavory reputation to me. The shipyards that the Alliance built up there..."

"Are almost all in the hands of the Boros independents now," Inara shot back, "and those that aren't are worried about how long they're going to be under siege and so on. Nobody's going to worry about me."

"And the purple bellies aren't the only thing you might have to worry about, going off to a moon by yourself," Mal insisted. "There's a revolution going on around here - a fairly friendly and merry thing, it looks from here in the city, but... but I wouldn't want to think of a thing happening to you, when we're so close to..."

"Well, I thought that you might react that way," Inara admitted, her lovely face shining with quiet feeing. "And I do mean to do it anyway. So how about if I invite you to come along?"

"Really?"

"Why not? You can play bodyguard to your heart's content, we can spend some time together and maybe cover some more ground in untangling the Gordian knot of our convoluted feelings, and maybe it'll even keep you ducked down out of the provisional government's way, so that they can't press you for a quick answer."

Mal thought about all of that - especially the 'spending time with her' part, and grinned. "Alright, when do you want to leave? Should we take your old shuttle?"

Inara laughed softly. "Umm... not until morning at least, and surely. It'll be nice to put her to some good use - but you don't handle the controls yourself, right??"

"Okay, okay," Mal sighed, not even trying to play the captain's authority card. "Well, I'll see about getting her stocked with emergency provisions and such." Inara shot him a dubious look. "Hey - bodyguard's perogative. I've still got an uncertain feeling about all of this, and making sure that we're prepared for just about anything is a precaution that I insist on."

"Very well. Don't bother with too much weight, though." As Inara spoke, Mal went out of her room to start getting ready - and bumped straight into Jayne.

"Oh, hey there Mal - I was lookin' for you," the mercenary said excitedly. "Got a job, right here on Boros. Not one for the whole damn crew, but I could use a partner, I figured, and thought that I'd ask you."

Mal blinked in confusion, very surprised that Jayne had even been keeping his eyes open for work in the festive city. "Umm... well, that's nice, Jayne, but I've already got some plans made."

It wasn't immediately clear if Jayne had even heard him. "Oh, this is SWEET, Mal. Some Alliance official took off and disappeared when things started to shake up on Boros - well, actually, I imagine that a lot of 'em did, but this guy was involved in the Department of Energy, and it turns out that a lot of key replacement parts, and schematics for the planet's power distribution grids, are missing now. Somebody saw his ship headed up into the Ravenor mountains, and I figured that there probably isn't a better pair of guys on the whole planet to retrieve the bounty than..."

"JAYNE," Mal said as clearly as he could, and plenty loud. "Wish you plenty of luck, but I'm not not your partner on this one. Inara is - well, she's been reported dead, and I've got to escort her up to Ares moon so that she can prove she's still very much alive with the rest of us."

"Reported dead?" Jayne blinked. "What, by someone who knowed about the fight at Mister Universe's place?"

"No, the one back on Paquin," Inara filled in helpfully from her doorway.

"Okay, well, makes sense," Jayne said after a moment. "No sense having the ambassador back with us if she's listed as a dead Companion, I guess. Take ya long?"

"A day, according to plan."

Jayne chuckled slightly. "Okay, so we'll send the rescue party out after you in four or five." Inara rolled her eyes.

"One suggestion, though - maybe you should ask Zoe if she's up for this job," Mal suggested to Jayne. "Could be good for her to have something to focus on like that."

"Hmm." Jayne considered. "Yeah, that's a mighty good idea. She'll be a big help."

Mal nodded. "Okay - you fixin' to use the other shuttle?"

"Umm, yeah, I s'pose so."

"Then as owner, I get ten percent of the fee."

"Okay, okay." Jayne now did some mental arithmetic. "Okay, you and Inara in one shuttle, heading to Ares. Me and Zoe, in the other, up hunting in the mountains. That leaves Kaylee, the doc, and River here mindin' the boat."

"Yeah, I guess that it does," Mal admitted. "Sounds alright. I trust Kaylee, and the others mostly, come to think on it. They shouldn't get into much trouble here in the heart of the city, after all."

"I suppose," Jayne muttered. "Any idea where Zoe's to be found? Dining hall, her bunk?"

"I haven't seen her since I've been back, but I haven't looked in much of the ship," Mal admitted.

"Don't think she was in the dining hall last time I passed through," Inara offered.

"Right - oh, that's another thing," Jayne said. "Speakin' of Zoe's bunk - does she still get to keep a big room, now that she's not sharing?" Inara let out a gasp of surprise at the inappropriateness of the remark. "I mean, I liked Wash a heap of a lot, but..."

"Do you want Zoe's bunk yourself, Jayne?" Mal asked, his voice becoming slightly hard.

"Actually no, wasn't for myself I asked. Just with Kaylee and Simon sharing..."

"Kaylee invited Simon to move in, and I don't think that they want a bigger room," Inara said.

"And anyway, Zoe's the first mate, she's been with me since the beginning, and that's why she's got the second biggest bunk," Mal said flatly. "She and Wash moved in together when they decided they were getting hitched up, which left Wash's room free for Kaylee, and you got Bester's bunk because it was free at the time." Mal stared Jayne down. "Do I make myself sufficiently clear?"

"That nobody's movin' unless somebody gets kicked off the ship?" Jayne asked.

"Or maybe if the people involved come to a free decision to switch," Mal agreed. "But no hinting to Zoe that she doesn't deserve her accomodations. I even hear of such a thing getting back to her..."

"Alright, alright, I get you," Jayne admitted, and stomped off towards the stairs.

Mal looked back towards Inara, who shrugged and then offered him a small smiled. "You handled that okay, I guess."

Mal nodded and wandered away, trying to figure out what gear he needed to pack.

----------

The next morning, the sunlight streamed down on the buildings of the city as Mal wandered into the shuttle. "Hey, how're we doing?" he asked.

"Umm... just trying to figure out how it is the Boros people expect me to file a flight plan, and then we'll be on our way," Inara muttered, bending over the flight control computer with an irritated air about her. Mal considered saying something, then sat down very quietly, in the copilot's chair, and concentrated on resisting the urge to touch any of the controls. After about five minutes the program that Inara was working at pinged softly, and she sighed, sitting back. "Okay, that's it. You all ready to go?"

"Umm, yeah I think," Mal said, looking down at his usual travelling clothes without being sure why. Maybe he was nervous about meeting an old friend of Inara's again - and one that wasn't a bit of a renegade who'd chosen to run a whorehouse on a distant moon, but a successful companion in good standing who apparently lived in a palacial mansion sitting on a huge tract of moon. "All stocked up with just about anything I think that we might need - shouldn't total more than two hundred or so in weight..."

"One ninety-two - I already checked," Inara said, and Mal blinked. Quickly she went through the seperation and takeoff sequence, and Mal realized that she was maintaining a very particular path up into the sky, that would be clear of other ships coming in for a landing. "Okay - twenty-three minutes or so until we get out of the atmosphere," she said then, switching control over to the autopilot. "Anything in particular you want to talk about, or do I get to pick the topic?"

Mal grunted in surprise at the sudden switch from businesslike to conversational. "Umm... I can't think of anything at the moment, except to say that you look nice this morning." Inara smiled in reply - she was in one of her more casual outfits for the trip - a blue skirt that wasn't quite knee-length, and v-neck reddish brown silk shirt, and two braids of her dark hair were pulled back from her forehead to form a nearly-complete circle around to the back of her head - like a coronet except made of hair instead of gold.

"Okay, how about this," Inara said. "What was Shadow like for you when you were young, before the war?" Mal blinked. "I... I realize that it's a personal question, but maybe that sort of thing will help - we're both private people, and for all the time we've spent together I don't think I've either learned much about your background or shared much about mine. I want understanding between us, Mal. Is that something that you can do for me?"

"Erm, well I'll try," Mal muttered softly. "Let's see. I grew up, as I believe I've mentioned, on a wheat ranch of Shadow. My mother was single when I was growing up, not widowed, and I at first I didn't ask much about the circumstances around that. Later I heard that she'd had a short affair with a foreman from a far-distant farm who'd been around on some sort of business. But - well, I guess it don't matter too much. She ran the farm in those days with her older brother, who had a steady woman and a daughter, a cousin around my own age."

"Alright," Inara said, as if she were giving her stamp of approval to the story so far.

"I was five when my uncle died of an accidental fall - and there was a blasting row between mother and Aunt Jevva when Uncle's contingencies were read - he'd left the land in his sister's name, though everything else he had in the world, which wasn't much, was for the care of his daughter and to Jevva. About a year later, Jevva found another man, a tourist from Londinium - he contracted marriage with her on the last day of his holiday and took her off the world with him when he went home. And took cousin Lees with him. Ain't ever heard of them since."

"But I never was lacking for much in those years myself. Mama and I loved each other something fierce - there were other young-uns living in the ranchhouse and nearby to make friends, and just about every field hand in the place seemed to figure it was his duty to treat me as his own son. Learned a lot there about the value of hard work, of building up strong character, and how to treat people right. And soon I was being sent off to the schoolhouse down the road to learn other things - reading and writing words, making up sums - then 'verse history, making and reading maps, alge and geo, some of the classic lits in the library."

"Yeah, that does sound like a pretty good way to grow up," Inara admitted.

"I suppose. The ranch was doing well, even after the Alliance proclaimed their dominion over Shadow, and started sending tax collectors in. The year I was twelve, my mother was even able to send me to a livin' school off in the countryside near Clipse city. Learned a lot there - art and poetry and working a computer, the basics of space navigation, but it weren't a good fit otherwise. I was powerful homesick, never having been away from my stomping grounds for so long, and being so upset I started to act out - back sassing the professors, and getting into fights. Losing many of them too, which had never happened before."

"Because before, you were the son of a ranch owner," Inara filled in. "That probably protected you in ways that you never saw."

"Perhaps that was it," Mal admitted with the trace of a smile. "Anyway, I didn't go back to the school after New Year's holidays, and some of the surly attitude stayed at home with me. Most of it was focused on a new target - the Agricultural Inspector."

"I told you earlier how the Alliance was demanding tax from us, but this was a development that had popped up while I'd been away at school, and it was worse. A department of Agricultural standardization had been set up, and now Mom couldn't hardly wash her hands 'less it was in the approved Alliance fashion. They told us what to plant, where, and how - that we had to use new devices in harvesting, and tend to the crops in certain patterns, and dump new chemicals onto them to 'get rid of pests' that we had never even got before."

"Not all of the new stuff was entirely stupid, I'll admit, but some of it was powerful idiotic. Mom and I both tried to argue with the Inspector, because we knew this land from personal experience, but it was just no use. They wouldn't believe anything but what they'd learned in school - and when it came to any attempts at outright refusal, the officials didn't hesitate to fine farms, arrest workers, or even seize the land and put somebody new in charge entirely."

"It was around this time, actually, that something else new started - my own first affair of the heart." Inara smiled very slightly in response to this. "The girl's name was Tarin, Tarin Lornitt, and she was the daughter of a field hand and a childsitter on the plantation next door. A little shorter than me, with middling-brown hair, lean body, and an incredible passion for life. I was head over heels, and was even talking about making things legal, and running the ranch together once Mom was willing to step aside - or maybe take a portion for ourselves, even though having to deal with those Inspectors myself was enough to take all the joy out of the notion of working the land."

"But things didn't work out that way."

Mal was silent for a long time as the shuttle climbed. Inara cleared her throat, and that got him started again, sort of. "I... I didn't see what changed all of our plans - though I heard enough from those who were witnesses. The plantation where Tarin lived had come in 'under quota', and the owners tried to challenge that, arguing that it was the pesticides that were ruining the crop. The inspectors came back after a few days and said that they'd come to their own conclusion - that Tarin's father had been negligent in spreading the fertilizer, and they directed the owners to dismiss him. They didn't want to, but their choice was between letting a good man go and losing everything, and they laid him off."

Mal took a deep breath. "Tarin attacked the inspector who had cost her father his job. Busted his nose in, fractured a hip and two ribs. I was kinduv proud of her, in a weird way - but it was an open and shut case, and she was sentenced to ten years in Riverside. That day that she was found guilty, was when I realized I had to find a different way to convince the Alliance that they needed to keep their noses out of our lives than words. Took me a few years to decide that had to be guns..."

"Oh, Mal," Inara said. "Did - did you ever see Tarin again?"

"Oh, yeah," he said absently. "Visited her a few times at the prison, and then - well, when things were just starting to get violent on Shadow, Independents captured most of the Alliance prisons, offering suitable candidates the opportunity to enlist - anybody who was inside for crimes against the Alliance or Alliance officials, among others. Tarin volunteered quick. We were never in the same company or anything, but she and I met up quite a few times, when we could. It wasn't like it had been before - she'd been in prison too long, and I'd been through a lot too - but it was some comfort to be together now and then."

"Oh. Did she... is she--"

"Her regiment was one of the first to move into Serenity Valley. Five hours after the fighting started, Tarin was blown into tiny little pieces by artillery. Friendly fire, they call it, though I'm not sure that a gun's really friendly even to the person who's holding it. Zoe and I hadn't even landed on Hera when it happened. Got an official spacegram to notify me of her death, since her mates knew that we used to be sweeties."

"Oh, god," Inara moaned. "Well, that's enough sharing from you, I guess. We're coming out of the atmosphere now, and I'll set the spiral course for Ares, and then take my turn. Sound good?"

"Sure I guess." Mal was staring out at the blackness of space, and the incredible vista of Boros under him. If you knew where to look, you could still see the craters and scars that the planet had acquired for itself during the Unification War.

TO BE CONTINUED...


	4. Chapter 4

Part Four

Simon started at the clanging sound, before he realized that it was just a shuttle leaving - shuttle one, with Inara and Mal aboard. A few moments later, arms wrapped around him from behind, and he could feel Kaylee's breath against his back. "Nervous much?" she asked quietly.

"Yeah, I guess so," he admitted. "Never expected to run into Garcia like this - and when Jayne and Zoe leave, it'll be just the three of us with him." There was an awkward silence. "Did - I never told you how I met up with Garcia, did I?"

"No, I hadn't even heard that he existed before last night," Kaylee reminded him. "Not him specifically, just 'people' who helped you save River. And no, you hadn't said how you met any of the people."

Simon turned around, draping his hand over Kaylee's shoulders, and they leaned together against the side of the cargo bay. "He met me, I guess I should say - faked some ID and made an appointment at the hospital on a bogus complaint. I still don't know his real name, just the aliac he used that time - Guillermo 'Bill' Garcia. He dropped a few..."

Just then, the story was cut off by a soft chime that was triggered by the signal button outside the airlock door. Side by side the two of them headed over, and so did River, skipping out from the direction of the infirmary and the passenger dorms. "Don't look so twitchy, Simon," she said when she spotted her brother. "I'll protect you, and I'm better at it than the evil threesome all put together." Simon just shook his head, wondering what Zoe had done to get labelled as 'evil' particularly.

His heart sank further when he realized that Garcia wasn't alone outside the door, having a younger man around River's age with him. Then again, Simon wasn't the only one who was entitled to be nervous he supposed - Garcia didn't really know that much about any of them, and might be worried for his own safety going into a strange ship. And River could deal with Garcia and his friend equally well - unless by some extreme chance the boy was nearly as special as River herself was - and that was just...

Kaylee had opened the door while he'd been thinking. "Hello Garcia - who's your friend?"

"Jeret," Garcia said in a terse introduction. "Nice little ship you've got here." Whether he'd meant it to or not, that compliment would definitely get him points with Kaylee.

"Hi there," River said graciously. "Have you had breakfast? We can go up into the lounge to talk."

"Yeah, that sounds nice, though you don't need to feed us," Garcia said. "Wouldn't mind a cup of something a bit stiumlating though. It's been a busy night."

So the two visitors were led up to the dining room, meeting Zoe along the way, who was just about to leave with Jayne, and everybody got settled for conversation. "Now - did you ever think much on what we'd be doing once you got River safely away from the Academy, Doctor Tam?" Garcia asked.

"Umm... not in too much detail I guess - I figured that you'd keep working against the Academy somehow - trying to sneak other people out, or maybe to get it shut down entirely if you could manage that. I was able to give you plenty of information from my trip inside that you said would be useful."

"Indeed it was," Garcia agreed. "We're all muchly obliged, and we did indeed try to get others out. You met some of my friends who had family inside too." Simon nodded. "We knew that we couldn't keep slipping people out one at a time, because security precautions would be increased after every breach, so the plan was made to get a number at once."

"Makes some sense," Kaylee said, sipping at her sweet broth.

"Yeah," Simon agreed, though he was starting to wonder what this had to do why Garcia was on Boros. There wasn't another academy here, was there?

"We managed to fake a communique, directing the Academy staff to send eight of their 'students' off to a sister facility on Londinium. The plan was that instead of meeting real Alliance couriers at the spaceport, the eight would be handed over to us, under false credentials. But - well, something happened that we hadn't counted on. The Academy representatives didn't meet us - because the children had taken what looked like a golden opportunity, hijacked the transport vehicle, and escaped."

"Oh, no," Kaylee breathed, seeing it. "They didn't know that you were..."

"And you've been looking for them ever since," River muttered.

"Um, yes, sort of," Garcia agreed uncomfortably. "There was a small freighter that got hijacked that day at the spaceport - and for a long time I was sure it was our kids who had done it. From what little you told us, Simon, it seemed possible that eight Academy subjects could pull it off. But I finally tracked down the Thoth's eye dissidents who ACTUALLY took that freighter, and it's pretty sure that the eight weren't even stowaways on board."

Simon was starting to grow interested in this now, and he could tell that River found the idea even more compelling. "So, there are eight people who had been guests of the same Academy where River was, on the loose, and nobody knows where they are??"

"The Alliance might," River admitted. "They have more resources to bring to the search than you do, Garcia."

"Yes, but I think I'm not fooling myself when I say that there are a few hints that at least one or two of them are still free," Garcia admitted. "Won't go into all the details, except - well, not long after the Miranda wave had come through, just as the confusion was getting to a peak, Stanislau got a personal message over the Cortex." He produced a glossy color printout. "The originating code is his wife's ID, and the salutation is the name of Martina's son's imaginary friend from when he was three."

"The Academy people might would have known the ID code, and might have been able to find out about Bartimaeus," Kaylee said, reading from the glossy in Simon's hands.

"But why would they?" Garcia's young friend suddenly burst out. "If they know about any of Garcia's group, why not just arrest them or ignore them? Why send them something like that??"

"I... I don't know why anybody would send something like this," Simon admitted, scanning the message. It was an oddly haunting kind of nonsense, with words making nearly-correct grammatical patterns, but forming no sense at all that he could fathom.

"It has to be a secret message of some sort," Garcia insisted. "None of us can fathom it, but if our eight stuck together, not knowing who else to trust, they might be so used to each other that they wouldn't remember that we aren't on their level. And they'd want to make sure that the message, whatever it is, wouldn't fall into the wrong hands if the message went astray."

"But 'Boros' appears here, just the once," Simon noticed. "So that was enough to get you to come?"

"Pretty much," he admitted. "It's the only thing there that seemed to refer to a possible rendezvous location."

"Can - can I see it?" River asked, stretching out a hand. A sudden thrill of excitement seemed to run through everybody else around the table, but nobody replied or moved to break the tableau for a long moment.

Simon, who was still holding the sheet of gibberish so that Kaylee could see it, shot a look at Garcia. "Umm, sure, go ahead - maybe only somebody else who's been there in the Academy can decode the message." So Simon put the glossy down on the table and easily pushed it over to River, who looked at if for a long time, while the others waited with bated breath. After a little while Simon snuck a look at the chrono out of sheer curiosity.

It was four minutes and eleven seconds after that when River handed the sheet carefully back to Garcia. "I... I feel like I can almost get it, but the crucial clue is escaping me. Some sort of very elegant and obscure secret message, I'm sure of that - breaking down each word and building them up into something that they're not. I'm afraid that 'Boros' is just a coincidence - it would be way to obvious to put it straight out there in the text."

"Yeah, I was afraid of that," Garcia admitted in a slow drawl. "But - well, at least it's brought me to you, and you're the closest thing that I have to a lead. Is - is there anything we could do that might get you closer to..."

"Maybe if I can meet the friends and relations of the eight," River said in a small voice. "Stanislaw and Martina..."

"Ooof, that'll take an awful lot of doing, but maybe." Garcia sighed. "Well, I'll let you know. You can reach me at this number, and I know where to find you. Leave it at that for now, I guess." He handed over the little slip with his contact on it to Simon.

"Aww, you're going to be leaving already?" Kaylee said. "I don't even know what your connection is to all this, Jeret."

"Safer that way," Garcia muttered as he got up.

"Sheesh, you really are getting paranoid, Garceeeah," Jeret shot back, exaggerating the older man's alias, (which maybe was a new one to him.) "I was gofer for a similar sort of anti-Alliance underground here on Boros, so volunteered for helping to show Garcia about while he was here, poking around looking for his runaways." And he grinned charmingly. "Too bad I didn't have an opportunity to get to know you better, Miss Frye." Kaylee reached out her hand for him to shake, and the young rebel brought her fingers to his mouth and kissed them dramatically.

Simon wasn't sure how to react to this. Whatever signals Garcia had picked up on so easily last night, either they weren't sending them out, or Jeret didn't notice them - or he was choosing not to let them stop him. As far as that went, Simon wasn't used to other attractive and eligible men paying attention to Kaylee even before they had finally gotten together. Maybe that was part of what had taken him so long to make his move - no little prods of jealousy to push him into taking the plunge. Of course, there had been - oh, what was his name - the old army buddy of Mal and Zoe's who'd gotten in trouble with the smugglers and... why couldn't Simon recall his...

"Hey?" Kaylee nudged him, once again rousing Simon from introspective thoughts. Looking into her eyes, Simon realized that he didn't have anything to worry about, and that he'd probably have to get used to dealing with this kind of situation, since he wanted to be with her for a long time. She was beautiful, other guys would express an interest from time to time, and he needed to make sure he wouldn't react wrong and drive her away.

Garcia and Jeret left Serenity. River turned to look at them, and Simon could see the mystery of that message still swirling in her eyes. "I... I'm going to go back to my room, but can I have some credits, in case I want to go out book shopping or something??"

"Err... okay, but do be careful when you're out in the big city by yourself," Kaylee warned, as she counted out some bills from the day before - most of them. "And don't hurt anybody unless you really do have to."

"Yeah," Simon said. "And maybe take a few hits yourself - if you plead self defense to some magistrate and don't have a scratch on you..."

"It'll be fine, you don't need to worry so much," River insisted. "Have fun collecting and selling off your stuff."

Simon rolled his eyes a little, and headed down the ramp next to Kaylee. "Okay, so after we've finished with that, what next?" he asked. "Do we do the spare part shopping today?"

"Umm... not right away," Kaylee decided after a moment. "After all that, maybe we should pick something that'd be fun for both of us." Simon opened his mouth to reply. "Yeah, I know that you'd enjoy watching me picking out power routing cable on some level, but that's not your fun, do you see what I mean?"

"Yeah, I guess," he admitted. "Any ideas?"

"Not yet, but we can keep both of our eyes open." They were already starting to leave the administrative center of the city, which wasn't that big, and the tiny spaceport was near the edge of it. At this time of Boros' day, the streets weren't too crowded, but other pedestrians were scattered all about, and Simon idly wondered what any of them would think of the two of them. Simon himself was dressed fairly casually, because it was an outfit Kaylee had told him that she liked - soft blue pants and a silver-gray shirt with three buttons at the tim and a simple t-shirt neck.

Kaylee, for her own part, was back into the 'engine room chic' that he was so used to seeing her in - a pair of rough gold-brown denim overalls, with a rainbow-colored shirt underneath and her hair in a simple ponytail.

"Oooh - passion pools," Kaylee said, pointing at a sign. "Not quite sure what that means, but it sounds like an interesting combination to try out."

"Hmm, yeah," Simon admitted. "Private jacuzzi rentals for couples, maybe?"

"Jacuzzi?" Kaylee repeated, sounding more than a little unfamiliar with the term.

"Umm, like a very small swimming pool, just big enough for a few people, and maybe two and a half feet deep. With heating units for the water, and pipes to blow in air bubbles..."

"Oh, hot tubs," Kaylee said with recognization, and Simon made a face, realizing that he'd possibly sounded more than a bit condescending, assuming that Kaylee had never run into the actual item just because she hadn't known the fancier term. "Don't be like that. I love it when you tell me what I already know, Simon."

"You're incredible," he whispered, suspecting that she might already know that too, with how often he was expressing the sentiment lately.

"So, back for the hot tubs once we've got your swag?"

"Nah, that sounds like more of an evening thing. We should do the part shopping while the stores will be open, really."

"Okay," Kaylee said, giving in to that logic.

"And this way I get to anticipate what you'll look like in a little swimsuit, all day."

"Ohh, I don't have a suit or nothing." Kaylee pouted. "And if it's just the two of us, wouldn't we just slip in nekkid?"

"Oh, but part of the fun is taking the suits off - slowly, once you're already in the tub," he teased her.

"Hmm... maybe they'll have suits that we can get there," Kaylee muttered, her eyes starting to dance at the possibilities. "Or if not there, one of the other stores I guess." She sighed and put that away. "So, just what is it that we're picking up, anyway? I've been trying to figure it out - what's valuable, non-perishable, not too heavy to ship, and easy to sell off quick."

"Hmm." Simon smiled. "Have you come up with anything?"

"A few notions. Pure osmium, beetle stones, or maybe something medical-related, like Laurentium serum or whatever it's called."

"All fairly good notions," Simon said. "In the end, I went for spools of good quality carbon nanofiber, which I hope won't be too hard to sell off."

"Oooh," Kaylee said, impressed by the possibilities. "Yeah, that'll be good."

------------

"Alright, Jayne," Zoe said once they'd been in the air for a little while. "Any notion how we're going to figure out where this guy flew to in the mountains? If we're the first bounty hunters to actually get headed out, we won't be the only ones looking for long."

"I've got our first stop worked out," Jayne said gruffly. "He had a summer home up here, that'd have been his first stop too."

"I guess," Zoe said. "Do you really expect that he'd leave clues there or something?"

"He'd leave his sense there."

"What??" Zoe shook herself slightly in confusion. "Did you say 'leave his scent', like you were gonna bloodhound his ass through the air..."

"No, I didn't say 'scent', I said 'sense'," Jayne shot back. "And that's what I'm going to track him with - sense, my own sense, and trying to follow his sense to him."

"Okay, that doesn't make much... I don't understand what you mean by it," Zoe said.

"You don't need to understand. Just watch, follow along, and help me in case actually catching him once I found him is the hard part," Jayne muttered.

"It certainly sounds like the simpler part," Zoe said in a low tone. But then, there was no denying that Jayne was, in his way, an eeriely good tracker - he'd never said much about his methods or lack of them, but maybe she should have expected that the methodology would be a bit unusual too. When he'd tracked Serenity for the first time, there hadn't been a ground trail, or visible contrail in the air, to follow after all.

"Okay, so where's the summer house?"

"Marked right here," Jayne said, producing a small map of the mountain area. Zoe took a quick look at it and adjusted course to head in the appropriate direction.

"What about your blood kin, Jayne?" Zoe asked after a moment. "I don't have much family left, a few cousins on Hera, and they seem like they'll be okay unless the Alliance sends warships out from the Core again."

"You mean, what with how we turned the 'verse upside down?" Zoe nodded, and Jayne shrugged. "Mama and the family live way out on the edge of nowhere, on Whittier, so I don't figure that even this'll reach 'em too quick. Not many around home even have vidscreens and audio receivers and what-not."

"Just the post?" Zoe asked. "I... I still remember your hat. You don't seem to wear it much anymore."

"The charm wore out of it quickly," Jayne admitted. "And the postal station is ten miles down the road in the village." Zoe nodded, impressed by the rusticness of it.

"Okay, well, you know that I'm not one to pry, but how does a kid growing up in the back of beyond like that grow up to be a daring and notorious interplanetary criminal mastermind?"

"Um, guess I couldn't tell... oh, you mean me?" Jayne blinked in surprise. "Well, maybe I'll let you stew on that and whether I'm going to let slip any details." He looked at the radar screen and frowned. "Whatever that is, do you think that maybe it's following us?"

"Hmm, I dunno - maybe heading out to the mountains too, at least," Zoe admitted. "Competition?"

"Wouldn't surprise."

-----------

"Okay, my turn I guess," Inara muttered, after she'd finished setting the course, and gotten them out of the most crowded part of Boros orbit.

"Yeah," Mal agreed, smiling. "Inara Serra's childhood on Sihnon, and how she joined the guild."

"Hmm, lemme think on how to start." That took about half of a minute, apparently. "I.. I don't even remember when I was raised by my parents. Have the file on them - lower-middle class married couple from the University district, both working on the service level, no other children permitted by the pop Board. A guild scout spotted me playing in the park with my mother when I was just a bit over four years old, and negotiated for the rights to enter me in intensive Guild training."

"They took you that young?" Mal breathed.

"You make it sound like the Guild were... were marauding Reavers or something, Mal," she said with an impatient sigh. "I was very well cared for in the Temple school, and if I had wanted to I could have left and gone back home..."

"To parents who were willing to sell you off," Mal added. "Yeah, I can see how that might not be too appealing..." Inara ignored that remark.

"My first few years with the guild, I was so happy, even if it was mostly just school and learning nearly all the time," she admitted. "All sorts of stuff, especially poetry and literature, manners and music..."

"Did Nandi ever tell you the story about the dulcimer?" Mal asked

"Don't keep interrupting me with distractions!" Inara snapped, shaking her head. "But, well, I'll answer that question though. She did - and I was actually there for the very end of it - not when she smashed, but - but I was in the next room working on a flute medley and heard the crash, rushed in. The instructor was just staring at her, and she got up and walked over to me and whispered, 'Dear sister, I think that it's time that I left this world.'" Inara sighed. "But that's long after. Let's see. I was in the temple's pre-novice school until I was twelve, which was when the full implications of the Guild are explained, and given my choice to join into preliminary orders. After that, I moved up into the true Guild school and began to learn other subjects."

"Like the sex part?" Mal asked.

"No, not for nearly three years after that," Inara said. "Like mental discipline. Guild regulations, and how the laws of various worlds in the Alliance affected our trade. And self-defense." She paused for a moment. "After the... the art of love training had started, I began to see clients - first 'drop-ins' or those who hadn't made a specific appointment, and then the novice's house mother started taking appointments for return visitors, after checking to make sure that it was alright with me."

"Appointments," Mal repeated slowly. "So that's how it starts?"

"They started us off with 'soft' engagements - people who just wanted company or flattery or whatever," she admitted. "Then meetings where some of the simpler forms of physical satisfaction were called for. Umm... when I was sixteen, I gave up my maidenhood to a customer who had specifically paid for the privilege." Mal blinked several times in succession like that. "Not terribly common, despite the high prices that are routinely offered - most girls would rather have their first time be under different circumstances, and the guiding principle of the Guild is that no member is ever forced or pressured into making a commitment that she's uncomfortable with keeping."

"After that night, the Temple was no longer quite the same. I'd been an initiate, under the care and instruction of the others - even though I was still a novice in preliminary orders, somehow completing the act of love with a client had thrust me into the demesnes of the temple politics - the subtle manipulation and favor bargaining that went on behind the scenes, hidden from all clients and outsiders. I didn't think much of that side of the Guild, but I learned to play the game some, in self-defense."

"About several years of that, after I'd confirmed my vows and become a full-fledged member, I was tapped for Isolate duty - working at one of the sea-bottom stations in Sihnon's Cathanian ocean. There's a lot of important work that is done deep down there - mining for valuables on the ocean floor, refining other important substances out of the water, and ichthy-zoological research. However, living with the high-pressure environment is wearying, and frequent shore leave is impractical, considering the several days of depressurization that are required."

"Ahh, I see," Mal said. "So the government and the corporations running things - they put aside a slush fund, to provide their workers with the best of Companionship."

"I suppose that's it," Inara admitted. "A guild detatchment is one of the most powerful inducements to attract trained personnel to inclement assignments like that. It pays well for the Companions on duty, but... well, the change was startling. Instead of working with some of the most powerful and fascinating people in the biggest city in the 'Verse, I was practically compelled to attend to the needs of simple-minded tradespeople and absent-minded scientists." Mal got a frowning expression on his face. "But all of my expectations were shattered once I started to know and understand the people who were working so hard down there. Loneliness was hard on me too, but the discipline I had learned at school was put to good use in bearing up under that."

"The station was where I first met Nandi, actually, and the reason that we got to know each other so well. The standing order was for a detachment of two Guild members, and she was the senior girl there, some years older than I. She taught me a lot, and asked me to tell her of anything new from the City, and we became fast friends."

"I only went up for shore leave once myself while I was at the station. My assignment had been for a period of three years, but about three months and two years in I was recalled to my home temple, because another lucrative offer had come in - one of my regulars from before I'd gone undersea was willing to spend a substantial amount of credit to have me join his household as a regular escort. I settled back into temple life for several weeks while considering the request, and eventually accepted a two-year renewable contract."

"What was the man's name?" Mal asked. Inara hesitated. "I'm not fishing for the drop of a famous moniker that I'd recognize - just wondered. In a way, this was your first regular man, and I'd like to have heard his name. You know about my girl, after all."

"True, that's fair enough," Inara said "His name was Justin Cerra, only a few years older than me, and the heir to the Blue Sun fortune." She sighed wistfully. "I... I grew to care for him a great deal, and living in his house also was a very happy time for me."

"But you didn't stay there for too long," Mal guessed. Inara shot a look at him. "Well, I mean - you're not still there, obviously - though I'm glad of that. Just..."

"No," Inara admitted. "After the first two years, I could tell that domestic life with Justin wasn't what I wanted, and I declined the renewal." She let out a very deep breath. "I know I may not have told as much as you did, but I still feel like this is enough for now."

"Okay," Mal muttered. "My turn again?"

"Umm... no, I don't really want to hear more about the war."

"Well, I didn't actually get up quite that far -- I mean, I did, but only by skipping ahead."

"Still - how about getting something to eat first?" Inara sighed. "Then more stories in the afternoon, and hopefully we'll be landing at Kazia's estate right around suppertime."

Mal shrugged. "Yeah, that works for me." And he got up to the supplies that he'd stowed, since the food dispenser in the shuttle wasn't working too well of late.

----------

In the early afternoon, River decided that she had had enough of sitting in the ship, puzzling over what she'd seen of the coded message, and trying not to let unpleasant memories of the Academy engulf her. She'd idly read through everything that Simon's pocket encyclopedia had to say that touched on the subject of cryptography, and at her reading speed that had taken up a good twenty-five minutes, (she'd turned off the vocalizer routine in frustration because the damn voice went so slowly,) but it hadn't given her any good ideas. Looking for books on the subject here in Boros didn't seem a much more promising lead, but at least it would keep her busy.

Then there was Serenity herself to think about. Simon and Kaylee wouldn't be back until late - River was sure of that, and even though she didn't expect to be gone for too long herself, and they were parked in essentially a guarded government lot, there had been too many unpleasant surprises for River to be comfortable with just locking the doors and leaving her like that. She didn't want somebody unfriendly lurking through Serenity's chambers - or lying in wait for any of them when they returned. However, a little simple ingenuity solved that problem to her satisfaction, and she headed off of the lot looking for book and/or computer stores.

It was about half an hour later, in the middle of a bazaar tent full of scrolls, browsing through one discussing the use of subliminal secrecy missives in the Londinium war of 2443, that River sensed something unexpected. It was... it was a presence, a single mind among the many that thronged through the city, initially attracting her attention for only one reason.

This mind, or its owner, alone among all of them, was hunting for her.

She wasn't sure how she could know so much about somebody who was still, apparently, very distant - far enough away that she wasn't entirely sure in what direction he or she - probably he - was, or anything else about who he was or how he was looking for her. Maybe it was something equivalent to catching a flash of metal in the distance that just happens to reflect the sun directly into your eye for a moment. Except that the 'flash' of this mind's preoccupation with her, with finding River Tam, was not momentary, but constant.

River did NOT want to be found, was not confident enough to let herself be discovered in an attempt to fathom and destroy this new danger, though it did occur to her. For one thing, she wasn't sure how formidable 'he' was, and suspected that by the time she could find that out, it would be nearly too late to run - too late to escape with any certainty, at least. But she didn't panic either, choosing instead to focus on that tiny distant tendril of thought and see how much she could find out about it by observation, without calling attention to herself.

Yes, it was a man, a fairly disciplined and focused man. And he was looking for her, not finding her - which suggested that he didn't have a stronger sense of her mind than she had of his, if he had any awareness of her at all amidst the many minds in the city. He would concentrate only on her, do whatever he felt he had to, to find her and restrain her - take her offplanet.

What could River do? Where could she run? Back to Serenity - no, if the man knew anything at all about her, that would be the first place he would look, and often. He might have already been there, just after she left. And remaining in the city crowds, lost among other minds, didn't seem like a good strategy - he might run into her by chance.

For a moment, River felt very hunted, not sure who to trust - and just in that instant, most of the hidden message seemed to snap into much sharper focus, though not quite clearly enough that she could see and understand any one part of it. Maybe meeting Garcia again and seeing the printout would be enough now. But she didn't have time to think about that.

Leaving the city, if she could, seemed like her best chance. River didn't think that the man would be able to tell in what direction she'd gone, even if she was leaving other people behind, and probably he would leave the city by nightfall, moving on to other possible leads, if she weren't around. Simon and Kaylee were okay - this guy wouldn't hurt or threaten them to get to her, as Early had, and as the Operative might if he'd gotten a chance to.

Of course, she had no vehicle or transport to use to leave with, but that was a shortcoming she found easy enough to remedy. Stepping out of the tent, River had only to glance once around the small square before finding a young man around her own age, looking gentle, affluent, and a little bit bored. In other words, he was exactly what she needed. "Hey," she called out, jogging up to him. "Do you wanna get out of the city for a while??"

"Umm... sure, maybe, I guess," he muttered. "Do I know you?"

"Not a bit - I just got here yesterday." River let out a theatrical sigh, feeling an odd sensation rush through her simply from the experience of interacting with a boy her own age, a stranger. "Not used to the cities anymore, I guess, and I feel like I can't breathe enough."

"Well, if your breathing is affected, then that's a medical emergency, and of course I have to help out, right?" the boy replied, starting to blush and grin inanely at this much attention from a pretty stranger. The 'medical' line threw River off of her flirt a bit, reminding her of her brother, but she managed to ignore that. "Umm - my place is about fifteen minute's walk from here, though - can you make it that long? Then we can use my wheels, and should be out into the countryside in, erm, in five more after that."

River considered. "Sure, I think that'll be okay." She started in the way that he had nodded his head when saying 'my place.' "By the way, umm, what's your name?"

"Derek Rolan - and you?"

River thought quickly. Did she want to give this boy her real name? Well, she liked her name, and didn't really want to deceive him any more than necessary. Maybe just a small alteration. "River Frye. Nice to meet you."

-----------

In the cockpit of Serenity, the mid-range communicator crackled to life - the sound coming from its simple transducers unheard by anyone, since the ship was deserted at this point. "Zoe in shuttle two calling Serenity. Come in Serenity." After a short pause, the communicator triggered a signal chime that could be heard all over the ship. Still, of course, there was no reply.

"Okay, well, I guess nobody's around, so I'll go over the basics for the playback system," Zoe said after several minutes. "We're doing okay here - just ready to leave Snowton's mountain place, and got a bit of a notion where to go from here - mostly Jayne's spooky hunch, but we'll see how that plays out, and it backs up another clue and a half. Just wanted to call in, to make sure that you know as much as possible about what's going on in case. There are a few other vehicles in the area, probably other would-be marshals, but they don't seem like much to worry about, and none of them have come near the house. Guess that we've got a rep and nobody wants to risk disturbing the brave and fierce scofflaws of Serenity, it seems."

"Zoe, come on," another voice broke in - Mal's voice. "One of those 'marshals' that you're not worrying about might be tapping into the line. I know that we're scrambled, but these are old units and still..."

"Oh, I realize that that's possible sir," Zoe agreed quickly. "Didn't realize that they still had enough juice to reach you, though - aren't you nearly to Ares by now?"

"Should be landing within the quarter-hour," Mal agreed, "and we're reading you loud and clear."

"Okay. Don't worry - I haven't been saying anything that I'd mind the competition hearing." There was a faint chuckle that might have been anybody's. "Have a good time at the mansion."

"And good hunting. Don't worry about the kids, they're probably having a lot of fun in the big city."

"Loud and clear. Over and out."

And then, for several hours, silence.

------------

"Okay," Inara said once Mal turned the communicator's sound receiver off. "I think that it's your turn again - life after the war ended."

"Hmm... okay I suppose, though I'm not sure how much I have to say about it," Mal admitted. "Everything that I'd believed in had come crashing down around me in Serenity valley - even though I was glad to be out of that place, relieved in some sense that I didn't have any reason to fight anymore, it took a while before there was anything that seemed worth living for."

"Stayed close to Zoe particularly, out of everybody I knew in the Browncoats - she'd been my right hand for about four years of the war, and I don't think I could have survived the peace without her, my own self. She had some family right there on Hera, and they invited me to stay with them for a while, which was quite a kindness. Everybody in the Independents seemed to be looking to reconnect with kin in the wake of defeat - them as could, anyway, and after the bombing of Shadow, I didn't have any relatives left alive in the 'Verse."

"Except for your cousin Lees," Inara pointed out slowly. "Who you hadn't seen in thirty years or so, and didn't know how to find."

"Yeah. Don't suppose I even thought of her at the time," Mal admitted. "I... I don't remember much of the year after the Verbena accords. Tried to help out some on Hera, repay Zoe's people for their hospitality in a trying time, made some effort to find decent work, but none of it seemed to matter..."

"Until the day you found a rusted-out old Firefly class in a used spaceships lot," Inara guessed.

"Actually, yeah, that would be it," Mal admitted. "I'd been mulling over the idea of trying to get a job on a freighter, and Zoe said that I had enough command experience from the war to captain one - it was an offhand remark, I later learned, not far from being a joke, but I headed up to Santo, to the cheapest rust heap in the whole 'verse, and this guy was trying to sell me a..." A flicker of movement somewhere below distracted him. "What's that?"

"Umm, just another shuttle taking off from Ares." Inara muttered, and Mal realized that they were very close now, the grayish-blue-green of the moon's surface spreading out ahead and 'beneath' them. "Hmm, it's coming a little bit close, actually." She reached out for the communicator mouthpiece. "Hey, I didn't catch your designation, but you're..."

And then she gasped, dropped the mouthpiece, and tried to adjust course. Mal tried to figure out what had shocked her so, and when the huge, ear-splitting KLANG rang out through their shuttle, at first he thought that there had been a mid-space collision. But no, their hull seemed to be intact, and a lot of the systems were functioning well. The things that Inara was doing to the flight controls didn't seem to match up with what was happening to the view outside the window, though - they were approaching the surface much too fast.

Suddenly, Mal realized what had happened - the other ship had used a magnetic grapple on them - its underside was stuck fast to their 'ceiling.' And it was trying to force them down, to drag them into the surface of Ares. The communicator crackled to life again. "Do you catch my designation NOW, Reynolds??"

"Jesse Sanchez?" Mal breathed, and Inara looked up at him. He reached out for the mouthpiece, blurting out the first thing to occur to him. "But - but how did you get here so fast??"

"That doesn't matter any more, Mal," Sanchez told him. "I'm here, and I'm going to make you pay for what you did to my brother, to my business - and to a bunch of my friends, as well."

"I didn't do anything!" Mal insisted. "It's not on me that the Alliance chose to stamp down on anyone they thought we might hide with..."

"Oh, and so you didn't do ANYTHING to provoke them?" Sanchez snarled across the comm. Mal didn't answer. He had made his decision to protect River, he had taunted that operative and disappeared from under his nose. He could have guessed that there would be an Alliance response, and that it wouldn't necessarily strike on target.

"Okay, okay, it's all my fault, fine," Mal suddenly blurted out. "But - but there's someone else here on this shuttle, and it's NOT her fault. If you do this to me, and she dies as well, then you're no better than those Alliance bastards, who killed your brother because they thought it might help catch me, and because they didn't care about him."

There was a silence on the line. "Jesse - Jesse, man, do you hear me?" Mal called frantically. Still no reply. And Mal realized with an unpleasant lump coming into his throat, that he wouldn't be able to talk Jesse Sanchez out of this. If he was going to save Inara's life, or his own - he'd have to figure out some other way to do it.

And the ground was still coming up towards them mighty fast.

TO BE CONTINUED...


	5. Chapter 5

Part Five

Mal Reynolds was no particular stranger to acting quickly in a crisis, and even though the shuttle, (and Inara and himself,) were only some seconds away from getting smashed into the surface of the moon, he didn't panic for more than an instant. Even got a kind of a plan forming, he thought to himself, quickly accessing the scanner and pulling up a heat reading on the other ship clamped to them, the one that Jesse Sanchez had gotten ahold of to pull this trap.

Inara glared at him, but Mal didn't think that this violated his vow to 'keep his hands off the controls' - that only applied to the piloting gear. He'd already worked the communicator, after all, and didn't see much of a difference between that and the scanner. Plus, it was a gorram crisis! However, the next part would have to be up to her. "Alright, Inara, I want you to spin us around," he said, fastening the harness straps in his own seat, and then moving on to secure Inara without even thinking about it. "Or flip us, really, so that we're further away from the surface and Jesse's closer."

"But... but he won't let us, he'll compensate..." Inara started.

"He can't compensate for that," Mal assured her, "Not if you go clockwise. He lost one maneuvering jet - probably when he was clamping us. That was a hell of a maneuver, because he was coming away from Ares to start, but wanted us both to be heading back towards it when all was done." Inara nodded some agreement to what he'd said. "And the other jet that he'd need, it won't fire, or won't fire right, because our hull is right up against it." Mal hoped that there was some sort of safety on those jets, otherwise Jesse might fire them anyway and cut the grapples, sending himself flying free and pushing them even harder into Ares. "But you've got to do it now!"

"Right," Inara said, engaging her own maneuvering jets. "That way, he'll stop pushing down, because he's only going to hurt himself." The flip finished, and Mal felt himself hanging upside down, because they were under Ares gravity now, not artificial gee inside the cockpit.

That same gravity was pulling both ships closer to the surface now, and momentum was pushing them the same way, as was the shuttle drive, since Inara had been trying to push up, and hadn't corrected that when she did the flip. For Sanchez's part, he'd been confused enough at their maneuver that he'd cut his own drive, not realizing that the same vector that had been pushing them down would have helped to save him now.

And the roof of his ship touched down on rough ground and started to drag. Mal felt like he was getting shaken to pieces, even though their shuttle was being held up in the air away from the impact, with the magnetic grapples still holding strong for now. It seemed like about a minute or more of crash-landing, and at the end of it, suddenly the shuttle cockpit was teetering back to its usual orientation - one grapple was letting go first, Mal realized, letting the ship flip back around like a lever. "Hold on," he muttered, and the flip completed itself when the second grapple let go, dropping them fifteen feet to the ground next to Sanchez's wreck.

"Are - are you okay?" Inara replied once it was all over.

"Umm... yeah, I think so," he mutered, and then repeated it more loudly in case she hadn't been able to hear. Scrambled to release the harness straps and take a good look around. "Ai-yah tyen-ah!" All of his carefully stocked supplies, of course, had been tossed around the back of the shuttle by the recent excitement, of course, and a lot of them were piled haphazardly up against the main thruster - which had just set itself, and a lot of the flammable packages on fire. Mal charged forward into the gathering smoke, trying to remember where the fire suppresion units were mounted. The first small cylinder he found emitted only a pale puff of white cloudy soot, which wasn't helpful. "Gorram, gorram, gorram..."

It was Inara who managed to find a working supressor and put out the supplies and the visible parts of the thruster, which just pretty much figured. "I... I can handle things in here," she managed to assure him, coughing somewhat from the combination of smoke and supression foam. "Shouldn't you, err, check the other ship?"

"Oh, right," Mal muttered. Yes, they had been brought down here by a man who had nothing to lose, and apparently felt he had no objective either but revenge. There was a small chance at least that he'd survived the crash, and Mal needed to find out if he was still able and willing to cause more trouble. "Right." But before leaving her side, without knowing quite why, he gathered Inara into his arms and kissed her.

She was an incredibly good kisser, even caught by surprise in such a tense situation, and there was something about the touch of her lips on his that was satisfying in more than just the usual physical way. At least I'll remember this one until the end of my days. But it was the WHY of that kiss that shadowed Mal as he headed over to the shuttle airlock. Had he just felt that he might possibly die at Sanchez' hands, and wanted to kiss her again before he died?

The air outside the shuttle was nicely breatheable, if oddly thin, very cold, and there was something about it that made his skin prickle and his hair stand up on end. (Or was that fear?) The Serenity shuttle was clearly in bad shape, and Jesse Sanchez's ship was already a pile of burning scrap. The chances of him surviving to pose a danger seemed less and less likely. Finding enouch of Jesse to prove that, however, was looking like a problem, however, especially as most of what was left of the ship was still upside down.

When he found what was left of Jesse, with the ship's front viewport between Mal and a fiercely raging fire sweeping through the cockpit, it was clear that the Sanchez brother had died a very grisly death in the crash. Mal lost no time in getting back to the shuttle and Inara, to find out that she'd started to take charge in there.

"Okay, well, we won't get a single inch further in this girl," Inara said sadly, running an hand over the inner wall of the room. "But Kazia's estates are only around twenty-five miles away - we should be able to get there on foot, especially with the lower gravity. It's still Ares night, and pretty cold out there, right? So I've gotten some good warm clothing for each of us, and a pack of essentials. The gravity is lower than normal, so it'll be easier to cover ground..."

"Do you have practice in walking long distances in low gravity?" Mal asked. "It's not as easy as it looks."

"I know," she insisted. "I haven't hiked, but I've gotten enough practice in getting around on the smaller moons I think. Paquin was nearly as light as this."

"Oh, right, yeah." That had been one of the more interesting parts of the fight with the Operative...

So they dressed up in the heavy snow pants and winter jackets, and Mal went through the pack to see what Inara had considered 'essential.' He also grabbed some food, figuring that fighting off cold weather required caloric energy. "Of course, once the dawn comes, we won't want these heavy clothes, but that won't be for seventeen hours or so," Inara admitted. And then, she very casually took off her skirt, fished in the pile for a pair of light pants, (were they his? No... something of Kaylee's he'd grabbed without really having any clear idea why,) to put them on underneath the heavier insulated pants. Max couldn't quite keep himself from staring at her shapely legs until they were covered up once again.

The cold bit much more fiercely once they had actually started away from the wrecked ships - a combination of being away from the flame and heated metal, and the adrenalin rush of the near escape and crash landing fading away. One thing that neither of them had said much about out loud was the notion of sending a signal for help - the medium-range communicator wasn't functioning, and Sanchez's ship still had its radio jammer working - which would mean that no emergency beacon would have gotten through. The only working communicator that Max had been able to find was a short-range wrist unit, which he would see if it was any good once they had walked out of range of the jammer. They walked on through land that seemed like a mix of bare earth and spotted grasses, under about two inches of loose powdery snow. "Should we start talking about our past again?" he asked out loud.

"I... I'm not sure if I want to hear any more about the war or things like that," Inara admitted after a moment, and he caught the hood of her jacket move, imagining her eyes looking up into the brilliant stars of the night sky. "I... I meant what I said about standing behind what we did with the truth of Miranda, Mal, but I'm also scared now. Will there be war among the worlds of the 'Verse once again? I... I never appreciated how horrible the war of Unification was until... until I heard about your experiences, and Zoe's. To face the thought that our own actions would bring on a war of De-Unification, just as bad..."

"I - I don't know what will happen next," Mal said, honestly enough. He still found it hard enough to believe that his own actions had been leading to something that was changing so many lives, all across the worlds. So he did what came naturally enough - he changed the subject. "Not particularly sure that I want to hear more about Companion 'temples' just at the moment, either."

"What... what is THAT supposed to mean?" Inara spat out, all of the ill temper she could cram into the words dripping out.

"Well, after this much, the hypocrisy of the whole setup is just starting to rankle," Mal went on, willfully disregarding the voices of caution. Keeping a lid on honesty wouldn't do any of them any good, and maybe getting Inara hot with anger and frustration would help keep her warm for the trek. "The companions use every bit of the trappings of religion, of faith and belief in something outside the material world, that they can - your glossary reeks of it. Temples and priestesses, taking vows, novices and initiates and so on. But when you boil that rhetoric away, there's nothing at the heart of your 'order' than the love of money, and there is nothing that I despise worse than those who take advantage of faith to richify themselves."

"That's hardly fair," Inara insisted. "Whatever you may think of our practices, we make no-one among our clients believe in our faith or proselytize to them."

"No, but you indoctrinate the new girls," Mal remarked acidly. "The ones who become new companions, and pay a certain cut of their take to their Temple and the Guild hierarchy, I don't doubt. Just what are the beliefs of the Companion order, anyhow? Nothing that'll interrupt the steady flow of cash money, I suppose."

"Outsiders are not told the tenets of our faith," Inara replied huffily. "But you're right in one thing - the flow of money, as you say, does not stop - or at least the majority of it does not stop, with the Companion herself or the Temple priestess or even the Guild council. Where from it flows after passing us by, I'll leave up to you to imagine."

"Now, that is an interesting notion," Mal admitted, plodding on through the snow. "Does it keep going on up, then - to some organization that's just using the Guild as a fundraising source??"

"No, no, it's nothing like that," she countered. "We're very much in control of the money, but we're not using it to buy luxuries for ourselves. It's being used on something much less... temporal."

And Mal couldn't think of a reply. The tactic was starting to turn against him - he could feel Inara's cold shoulder from here.

-----------

"He's not far away," Jayne muttered, and Zoe nodded, looking at the little sensor-device in her hand. "Expecting company, though. Better to wait it out right here and try to catch him come nightfall."

"I don't object to that plan, if it just comes down to us and him," Zoe muttered uncertainly. "Just wondering about the other ships in the area, though. Nobody's close, but they'll have seen us land here. Even if nobody wants to come up against us directly, I wouldn't rule out a swoop 'n' snatch."

"We can keep an eye on them," Jayne said indolently, stretching out with his butt resting on an old tree stump. "So, anything new in the plans of Zoe? I mean, you just goin' to stick with the ship, and with Mal, whatever he leads to next?"

"Hmm? Well, I suppose." Zoe sighed. "That was the plan from the beginning. Never... never expected that I'd find a guy like Wash by serving as Mal's first mate, but... but I did, and in the process I found myself a home. Now - well, Wash has gone on, to fly free wherever, but I still have that home. Don't see myself turning my back on it while it's still there."

"Gorram it," Jayne muttered under his breath. Zoe looked over at him, her sharp ears not missing that grunt, but she didn't pursue the thought. "I guess your home on Hera got torn up pretty bad in the war."

"Hera?" Zoe looked up at him a bit oddly. "I have kin on Hera, and I was stuck groundbound with them for a while when I was little, but that was never home." She sighed. "I was born on a ship, grew up on a ship, and didn't ever appreciate ships so much as when I was stuck without one."

"Like when you were in the war," Jayne supplied. "Most of the fighting was planetside, yes?"

"Most of what I saw, yes," Zoe admitted. "I applied for a command post in the Independent Deep Navy, but didn't get accepted, so took career army. Saw a few scraps as part of a Marine detatchment - fighting off a boarding party or going along with one, but soon they started sticking us with ground missions."

"Okay," Jayne said, no longer too interested. "And Wash - do, do you really believe that there's some part of him - some part of anybody, that don't die? I've wondered about such a thing - talked about it with the Preacher man, but still... always figured that if there were such a thing as souls, somebody would have figured out a way to stick around and haunt me for makin' him a ghost by now."

"It's not that easy to stick around here when you're... like they are," Zoe said, unable to keep from laughing. "But yeah, I do believe in souls, and an afterlife, though I guess I'm not sure about what it's like. Consciousness... the way that people are able to think, and to be aware of what they're thinking, that's so incredible a thing that it can't just be tied to these mortal bodies of ours, and gets snuffed when the heart starts beating."

"Hmm." Jayne thought about that. "What did we bring to eat, and do you think it's worth a try to hunt something meaty around here?"

"You can go chasing the wild mountain goats if you want, Jayne," Zoe said with a bit of a groan. "I wouldn't say no to some flame roasted chevon. But I'm going to keep watch here, just in case."

"That works for me, yeah," Jayne admitted. "Got a lead on any goats from that thing?" He went to the shuttle, came out carrying a fairly slender rifle, and followed Zoe's outstretched arm pointing out of the clearing.

------------

"I... I'm not sure that I can go much farther, Mal," Inara said, after he didn't know how much silent walking. (It was over three hours since they'd left the ship, according to his chrono, though they hadn't been quiet all that time.) "It... it's so cold, and I'm tired."

"Is only going to get colder, as the night gets longer, Inara," Mal replied, sympathetically. "And the best way to stay warm is to keep moving." There was a despairing sigh from her. "Okay, well... we might as well slow down to a meander, though, for a little bit, and grab some grub. Need to keep the body stoked with fuel to keep warm in this kind of weather. And then we keep right on going, understand?"

"Yeah, as long as I can sit down for just a minute or so," Inara insisted. "Just long enough to get some cold water out of these boots."

"Alright, reckon I could do with that, though I think that the water in my boots must be nearly at body temperature by now," he decided.

So they had a rough break for provisions - small rolls of bread, and self-warming bottles of hearty chicken soup that Mal found very reviving, and artificual baby carrot sticks. He took a drink of the triple-filtered water, since Zoe had told him once that eating snow on frozen worlds wasn't a good idea. Once the day broke, they'd be able to find some water source, and Inara had packed a purifier kit.

"Okay, I guess we might as well talk about something as we go, and I'm sorry I brought up that stuff about the Guild," Mal muttered, tromping along. "You're right that I don't understand everything about the Guild, though you can't blame me so much for jumping to conclusions when you keep so many secrets."

"Then I accept your apology, if you move off to a new topic," Inara said.

All of a sudden Mal found himself blurting out the last thing he'd ever have expected to say. "What - just what do you feel for me, Inara? I... I'd want to have you as my own lady, to have and to hold only to you, until death parts us, but I somehow can't imagine that you'd ever stand for that. You may like me a whole bunch, but that isn't a match for how much you love the Guild li... well, could you?"

"To... to retire from the Guild, and marry you?" A wistful smile crossed Inara's face, as she turned towards him, with snowflakes clinging to the furry fringe of the hood and to her amazingly long eyelashes. "No, though the idea does have some appeal, I - I'm not sure I'm ready for that - for that life."

"Now, what do you mean by that?"

"Well, let me turn it around on you," Inara countered. "If... if I said that I would do all that, on the condition that you - that you had to give up Serenity and settle down to some other job -- how would you react to it??"

"What??" Mal was surprised. "Would - would that really make a difference? I thought you loved 'Serenity' near as much as I do... and the gang..."

"I... I do, as an independent woman, with my own calling," Inara said softly. "Most of the time at least. But... but to be married to a ship captain taking dangerous criminal jobs... I'm not sure I could deal too well with that. And - and what else would I do on board ship if I weren't your 'ambassador'? I don't want to be just arm candy, and I don't really have the skills to fill another role on board. On a planet, I could find other work, I expect... not that I'm saying I'm eager for that, you realize..."

"Yeah," Mal muttered, sighing. "It was just a hypothetical. But... short of that, you didn't answer my question. If... if we don't get wed - if you stay in the guild, then what do you want of me?"

"I... I can't even say it out loud, yet," Inara muttered apologetically. "Not all of what I want. But I'd settle for having you in my bed - once we get back to a bed, I mean."

Mal raised his eyes. "You'd take me as a lover, then?"

"Yes." Inara's cheeks were brilliantly red, and he knew that that wasn't a reaction to the bitter cold. "We... we would have to keep it secret. It's considered undesirable for a Companion to have a consort of her own, openly."

"Scares off the prospective clients," Mal muttered.

"Essentially, yes."

"Sneak around on ship, keep it quiet from the other members of the crew, even?" Mal wondered out loud. "It's hard to keep such goings-on quiet in a small space, where there's only so many places to look for someone."

"Yes, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve." Inara sighed. "You could confide in Zoe if you want - she's discreet. Most of the others might slip up at the wrong moment, I'm afraid."

"Okay." Mal kept on tromping through the snow, and their path took them down a gentle rise. Now that they'd said so much out loud, he was having to fight off an absurd urge to sweep Inara up into a passionate embrace, right here and now, but it was definitely not the time.

"I... I'm not sure it's a good idea to go on any longer, Mal, no matter how good for the cold exercise is. My core temperature is dropping. Maybe we should just set up a makeshift shelter and try to hunker down for the rest of the night, or at least a good while."

"What d'you mean, your core temperature is dropping - you can't tell such a... or is that a part of Companion training too?" Mal looked at his chrono again, surprised to find it was nearly two hours since they'd eaten. Where had the time gone?

"Well, we're educated in sensing a lot of things about the condition of our own bodies, for obvious reasons," Inara muttered. "And all of the traditional symptoms of mild hypothermia are showing up too... strong shivering, numb hands, shallow breathing, goose bumps. I... I'm feeling confused, and have a strongly paradoxical urge to take off the winter clothes - that sort of confusion of thought is characteristic of stage two..."

"Okay, okay, I'll take your word for it," Mal muttered, wondering if he was starting to die of the cold too. "But - but we don't have much for shelter making, and if we're to stay alive without keeping on the move..."

"We've got our clothing, and some to spare," Inara said, starting to sweep some snow clear from a shallow hollow in the ground. "We can layer that beneath and above our bodies, and huddle together naked to share our body warmth. I... I think that that'll be enough. And - and there's the ignition ray - no wood to gather, but we could use that to warm a rock a little and that'll help a bit."

Mal paused, and wondered just fleetingly if his befuddled brains were being swayed too much by extraneous notions - and whether the prospect of being naked with Inara was something he should be looking forward to, or scared of. "Okay, let's give it a try."

But they didn't do it right away, because once the basics of the camp had been set, both of the weary backpackers were eager to eat again. Inara used the ignition ray to good effect, though Mal had to warn her against not wasting its charge - they might need more heat later, and possibly even to actually use it to light campfires. In his own pack, Mal found a small powered saucepan, which would use microwaves to warm or heat anything water-based placed inside it, so he eagerly served out some baked beans as an appetizer, and then melted a small batch of snow and added a package of 'instant dehydrated synthetic stew' to it. The results were actually verging on cheerful, which probably just was from contrast to how the rest of the day had gone. They chatted a bit about the others while they ate, how Kaylee and the Tams were probably living it up in the big city, and how Zoe and Jayne might be eating campfire food too, but at least they'd been better prepared for it.

Mal tried melting a bit more snow, just to the point where it was still cool enough to drink comfortably, and then Inara produced some herbal tea packets and infused them into hotter melt-water. Mal was feeling like he'd been warmed enough by all of this that he could probably stand to walk along further, but Inara seemed determined to turn their camp into her snug-shelter. Mal was actually a bit disappointed that he didn't get any kind of a chance to look at Inara without her clothes on, but given that the point was NOT to get exposed to the cold weather, that did make some sense. She stripped off under the layer of warm clothes that had already been spread out on top, and then told him to come on in and join her.

They ended up with Inara spooning him from behind, the warm rock, (which Mal had had to talk her again out of boosting with the ignition ray so it would be even hotter,) at her back. "You... you don't mind that the rock's on my side, right Mal? I think it's easier for the cold to get at me, because I don't have as much body mass, and if I'm warm, I can warm you up better."

Inara definitely felt warm, pressing herself against the full length of his body, her breath feeling nearly hot against his neck and one ear. Warmest of all, perhaps, was her passionate bosom. "Yeah, I think that that's working alright." Since they'd declared their intention to be lovers, though this wasn't the right time perhaps, he felt inclined to reach a hand back towards her, though the position was awkward - he did manage to caress the smooth skin of her hip - at least, he figured it had to be hip.

Inara was able to respond with her own hands to better effect. "Oooh, there's a good heat source right here," she muttered, wrapping her cool fingers around the stiff pole pointing out from behind his legs. "Yeah, this is comfy. We should get some sleep while we're here."

"Sleep?" Mal croaked out. "Do... do you really think that I could sleep, feeling like this??"

"Oh, I wouldn't be surprised." And then Inara's hand was moving up his body, massaging in a deeply relaxing way, instead of an erotic touch. Before Mal really understood what was happening, he did suddenly fall...

-------------

"You know, River, you're more than a little bit weird," Derek mentioned idly. River broke out into hearty laughter, but she did keep the thought that came to her silent. Dear boy - you have no idea of a quarter of it!

"Yeah, umm... I..." She had a hard time thinking of something to say, which was just making the problem worse in general. "Good thing I'm more than a little bit cute too, huh?"

"Actually, yeah, I guess you've got a point." They were sitting together on a rough wooden bench outside a run-down riverside cabin that he'd told her wasn't anybody's in particular anymore, and that he always loved coming out here. "And now your face is going all quiet again. I like to know what weird things are going through that cute head of yours."

"Umm... wondering what birds think about," River muttered to him, her eyes tracking a small songbird with a red mark on its breast flying past. Pheucticus ludovicianus or a variant species? Heck, maybe nobody had ever made a formal taxonomic survey on a world like Boros, to settle the matter. And 'wondering' was not really the right word - she'd never had the opportunity to really use her mental talents on anybody but people once she'd finally got some kind of control over them. People and Reavers, if you made a distinction between them, which River had to admit that she did. She had a vague memory of cow thoughts from Jiangyin, but cows didn't really have that many interesting thoughts, even the ones who were pastured out on the range or had many fields to range over.

Birds, on the other hand, even though their minds were smaller and somewhat less intense than larger mammals, were wild - at least, all the birds here were, and River hadn't nearly stopped getting surprised at what would pass through their flighty little attentions next.

"Probably a lot about food, and mating, and watching out for anybody who might be hunting them, and safe places to nest and sleep," Derek pointed out sensibly, and River nodded, since that did cover a lot of what she'd received. Suddenly, there was a loud smack, and a tiny spark that River hadn't even realized she was sensing had been snuffed out. "I wish that there were more who thought that the skeeters were good eating."

River turned around to look at Derek, who was rubbing a bit of a dark smeary something off of his bare forearm. "You... you killed the bug?"

"She was ettin' on me!" Derek protested, in a different dialog than she was used to hearing him talking. "I... you're not some 'hurt none of the 'verses creatures... umm, fanatic, are ye? Because - well, I appreciate the sentiment about not trying to hurt animals for no good reason, but critters like that... it's not the blood that I mind losing, really, but they can spread diseases, and no way left to keep them from comin' at ya but... well, you know."

"Hmm." In the spirit of inquiry, River put out her arm just as a large mosquito was buzzing past, and sure enough, it swerved to take the bait. River waited just a fraction of a second as it prepared to bite, and then flicked it off her with the first finger of her other hand, not hard enough to really hurt it. "That was your first warning," she muttered, trying to send the message into the tiny little cluster of nerves that served the bug in place of a true brain. "Find somebody else to snack on."

But the bug swerved around, its attention focusing on her bare legs, down near the ankle. For an instant, River caught a trace of thought, an instinctive impulse so simple that it could not be turned aside, and also realized that the determination to hunt was not for this bug herself - she would be using the blood to lay eggs, not to nourish herself. As it landed on her leg, River reached down and smashed the strongest part of her hand into it. "Sorry, bug," she whispered. "If you're not going to learn, about not hurting people, then you'll have to get swatted." Perhaps that was a lesson that could be carried over to somewhat higher life forms than mosquitos - like some of the people who the crew of Serenity had met in their travels.

"You haven't told me anything about you, River," Derek insisted.

"Well, neither have you. Isn't it more fun this way? We can make up all of the details we never heard ourselves, later, after this one enchanting moment is over with."

"Aiya, you can make up stuff about me if you want to, but I'd rather have some of the details straight from you." Derek sighed as he looked around.

"Umm, okay - I'm here on Boros with my brother and his... his wife Kaylee. We were - were supposed to be going to Paquin, but there were warnings of danger - pirates or something, because of the Miranda wave. Boros was the nearest place that the captain thought he'd be safe."

"How many people on board the ship? Are your relatives crew?"

"Yeah, Simon's a medic and she's an engineer. It's a pretty big hauler - thirty people in the crew, maybe more." River wasn't quite sure why she was still making stuff up in terms of these minor details, maybe it was just fun on some level to suggest possibilities that had never been this way.

She was starting to think that it was about time that they went back to the city - the sun had nearly set, and the man looking for her, whoever he was, had almost certainly moved on. Simon and Kaylee might be worrying about her - she'd been gone from the ship much longer than she planned to. However, another mischievous idea was forming in her head - Derek had been very nice and sweet to her, helping out when she really needed a hand, and she wanted to find some way to give him a proper thank-you. Dipping into the boy's head and carefully extracting a few daydreams about being alone with a pretty girl in this sort of situation wasn't hard, and she was a bit surprised at how sexually intense most of them were. Oh well, there was one scenario that seemed doable.

She turned to face Derek, took a deep breath, and wrapped her arms around his neck. "You... you'll probably never know how much you helped me out when you gave me a life out here, Derek." And she brought her lips to his. Kissing wasn't like she thought it would be, and it was probably a good thing that Derek had some practice himself, so that River could pick up on the technique from him. "Thank you."

"Okay, so..." He gave her a wide grin. "So I'm the knight in shiny armor, then, rescuing you without even knowing how much danger my blushing damsel was in."

"Some - something like that. And as I understand it, there are certain privileges to making a good knightly rescue."

"I... I don't want to go through with something like that just because you're stressed and grateful. I'd prefer you kiss me because you know me and like me for me..."

"Oh, come on, give me a break!" River exclaimed. "You... you get full points for chivalry, but - I'm the mystery woman, really I am. When you take me back to the city tonight, we'll never meet again. Don't you get off on that at least a little?"

Derek locked his gaze on her, and then he returned her kiss, holding her tight and letting his lips drift up to nuzzle her ear. "Okay, but let me know before I get too far. I really don't think I have that much gratitude coming to me for what I've done."

"No, not that far," River admitted, loving what his tongue was doing to her skin. "I'm nervous about this kind of thing too, and you're a good teacher," she admitted. "How about this?" She grabbed his wrist in her hand and brought it to her chest, cupping from outside her simple dress.

"Wow, I'm not sure I've graduated that far, but thanks..."

-------------

"Mal, wake up." Something soft was nudging him, and it didn't take Mal long to realize that it must be Inara - or part of her. "We need to get up - head out on the move again."

"Hmm??" Mal managed to open his eyes and peek out through a very small crack in the clothes that covered them in their shelter. It was still very dark out there, and seemed very cold, but he felt warm and comfortable here with the woman he dearly loved. And he didn't want to think any further about moving. "No, stay here. Dawn hasn't come yet, it's the coldest part of the night. Comfy, warm here with you."

"Mal, this is important," Inara said, using a strident tone. He could feel her moving, and realized that she was struggling to find and pull on her clothes. "Something's very wrong, and we need to at least get up and..."

"No, nothing's wrong." Mal wasn't sure about that... something seemed a bit unnatural about the fog that lay on his brain, it wasn't just the usual sleepiness. Hangover, or the effect of something like the goodnight kiss? Possible, but they hadn't been drinking, (he knew that the warmth of booze in cold weather was an illusion,) and he didn't figure that Inara had used anything chemical to put him to sleep - because that would lead to this sort of situation in getting him up. "Or... I just want to go back to sleep..."

"I think that that's part of it," Inara muttered. "I feel it to, but something - something's not..."

"And you were the one who wanted to lay down and snuggle up together naked," he rambled groggily. Suddenly there was a lot of movement, and the next thing, Inara, (who hadn't finished dressing warm enough for the outside weather herself,) had pulled his head and shoulders out of the shelter. "Do - do you see that, back the way we came from?"

"I... I can see a kind of reddish glow against the sky," Mal muttered.

"The woods are burning, Mal," Inara told him. "Probably one of the ships started the fire."

"Okay, that makes some sense," he admitted. "But why is that a problem? There's no forest near here, and fire can't spread easily through grass with snow on the ground..."

"It's the air, Mal," Inara lectured. "The atmosphere here on Ares is very thin, and it's almost all oxygen. No nitrogen to help smother a fire. That means it'll be quickly used up. I think that the air we're breathing here is already pretty stale, and it's only going to get worse."

That managed to cut through Mal's fog. Bad air was always something to worry about - it had nearly gotten him before, along with a gut shot... "Carbon dioxide, from the flames??"

"Yes, and worse," Inara said, pulling on her top and throwing him a sweater. "In this atmosphere, I'm worried about monoxide - that strangles forty times worse than dioxide. And the symptoms are a lot like a viral infection - you just feel sleepy and have no energy..."

By then, even though Mal was feeling very much like he had no energy, he was scrambling to dress himself, and trying to figure out how much they needed to pack up before they could leave. The heat of the fire couldn't have spread this far, because it felt VERY frigid. But if they could walk, that would warm them up...

Inara did more packing, and they hadn't left much out of their backpacks except for the spare clothes. It was hard to get moving, and even harder to keep putting one foot in front of the other after the first minute, but the two of them leaned against each other and kept going.

"We... we don't have any oxygen masks, do we?" Mal muttered. "I know I put them in the shuttle."

"No, sorry," Inara muttered. "I didn't bring them along in the backpacks - didn't realize that we'd need them."

"Well, I guess it's too late to go back and fetch them," Mal said dryly. Inara broke out laughing, then gasped and coughed, and swatted him. Mal made a mental note to be careful not to make her laugh until the breathing was easier.

Whenever that would be.

And then he forgot about laughter completely. Just... keep... moving...

TO BE CONTINUED... 


	6. Chapter 6

Part Six

At the same moment as Mal and Inara were struggling away from their shelter camp, trying to fight off the effects of bad air from a wildfire, Jayne and Zoe were sitting on opposite sides of a bright campfire in the Ravenor mountains on Boros, enjoying some roasted wild goat. A slight frown developed on Zoe's face, though, as she looked up into the sky. Boros was a large crescent shape, kind of browny-green, while Boros' second moon, Verbena, was in another quadrant of the sky, more than half full but much smaller, a kind of lavender-purple color. It didn't surprise Zoe to know how many people lived upon those colored spots in the sky, but sometimes seeing populated worlds this way did seem a bit surreal.

"Somethin' on your mind?" Jayne asked as he munched. "The radio silence thing??"

"Maybe a little," she allowed. "Not being able to reach the main ship, still - not that important. It's getting into evening in the capital city, and there's all kinds of things that the kids could be up to. But Mal - it's not like him to not answer."

"Well, they'll have landed at the Companion's place by now," Jayne pointed out. "Probably enjoying high tea with her, and getting shown the mansion, and all kinds of things. They wouldn't be in the ship. And maybe he either forgot to link in his portable comm unit, or, umm..."

"Or etiquette would not permit," Zoe filled in, not expecting Jayne to be familiar with the word 'etiquette' for any reason. "Okay, yeah, that's a point." She returned to her own plateful of dinner, making a mental note that when she managed to raise Serenity, she should have them check just to make sure, that the Shuttle's beacon could be found landed on the property of Kazia Laurentis, registered companion.

"Man, this feels good, eatin' off the land," Jayne muttered. "Reminds me of the time that I was poachin' in the Planetary park on Prynus - sheesh, try saying that ten times fast. 'Poachin' in the planet...'"

"Poaching, Jayne?" Zoe asked. "For what?"

"Oh, all kinds of things... don't remember many of the names - there were horned critters and furry pelted ones, all kinds of rare animals in a place like that what would fetch a good price to the right people, either dead or alive." He sighed. "Ranny Kelman, whats-his-name with the ponytail and me, we were well paid to do the huntin', and the critter fence who set the deal up provided us with scattering fields and other stuff to help us hide from the park rangers." Jayne sighed. "But what I mostly remember wasn't even spending the money over on Beaumonde - it was living in the park, camping out, and eating like kings off of anything we could catch that wasn't particularly saleable."

"Did you ever think of trying your luck living as a hunter out in the wilderness?" Zoe asked casually. "In a place like this I mean."

"Yeah, actually, but Ranny talked me outtuv it," Jayne admitted. "It looks like a good and easy life when you're all stocked up with a few of the necessities of survival, but trying to feed yourself and scrounge up money for ammo and stuff at the same time, that's where things start to get tough."

"I suppose that's true. Unless you manage to beat the math, it beats you," Zoe said. "Any idea how late we should head off on our manhunt?"

"Hmm... well, it's already past twilight, but not that late by the Boros clock." Jayne considered, looking around him at the moons. "Which of those do you suppose will set first?"

"Ares," Zoe instantly answered. "In an hour and a half, or so."

"Then we leave in an hour," Jayne decided. "Get into his area just when it's setting that way."

"Okay I guess."

Jayne looked up at her, a canny expression flicking over his face. "Somethin... something on your mind? I mean, well, besides the obvious?"

"Yes, I've got a lot on my mind, Jayne," Zoe told him. "And for now, that's where it's staying." She stood up. "Gonna try to get a bit of rest before we move."

"Don't oversleep."

"Like I've ever been late for a job," she said, and that was true. But as Zoe laid down near the shuttle's door, Jayne looked into the dancing flickers of flame and tried to figure out what it was he'd... sensed from Zoe. Something that was on her mind. He couldn't put his finger on it more than that.

------------

Simon, already up to about his shoulders in the tub, got a big grin on his face when Kaylee stepped from the changing passageway into their private chamber and shucked off her robe. She had picked out a simple tank-style suit, in a bright and cheerful pattern of pastel colors (of course,) and looked breathtaking in it.

"Thank you, thank you, hold your applause until the end of the session," she kidded, climbing down into the opulent jacuzzi with him. And she leaned over and kissed him.

"Was that for anything in particular?" Simon asked her, begging the question

"Just because I like you?" she teased back. "And for making me feel like... oh, I don't even know a word for it certain. Like a great lady, except not quite so stuffy and proper."

"Cherished?" Simon hazarded, and kissed her back, on the cheek. "Because you are, and if I can manage to show you just how much..."

"Hmm..." Kaylee considered the word as she settled herself next to him in the warm, bubbling water. "Okay, yeah, that'll do. Yah didn't really need to spend that much of the nanofiber bounty on me an' my..." At that point she drifted off.

"Yeah, it's my engine too," Simon pointed out. "Not like it's yours, or Mal's, but it's the lifeblood and the hope of every single person on board when we brave the vacuum, as has been made abundantly clear several times." He smiled. "And, plus, I wouldn't have gotten nearly as good a price on the fiber without your help selling it, and so it only seemed fair that you should see your cut this way."

"Oh, is that what it was?" she asked playfully. After picking up and inspecting the spools, they had gone to half a dozen different buyers, spread over Amarra City, before one had been willing to offer what Kaylee had considered 'a half-decent price.'

That had taken them into the early afternoon, (Simon had hired out a groundcar after his legs rebelled at the prospect of walking any further,) and after they'd grabbed some cardboard boxes of food from a street vendor and enjoying an impromptu picnic in a small neighborhood park, Simon had insisted that they tour the engine mechanic shops, and pressed her to expand her shopping list further and further. 'What if someone gets aboard and disables the controls, like Saffron, or whatever-her-name is, did twice? Are there tools that would make it easier to fix whatever she might try to do, before it's too late?'

By the time that buying expedition was over, they had been to four more places, (and one of the same ones where Kaylee had refused to let him sell the fiber spools,) and had accumulated about four heavy bags worth of gear. Also, both Simon and Kaylee were hungry, and couldn't wait to get back to the passion pools right after eating. Kaylee suggested a vegetarian eatery where their stir-frys were prepared right in front of them by enthusiastic chefs who seemed to like yelling for no reason that Simon could see.

As the memory of their day together flashed through Simon's mind, he moved over just a bit, closer to his dearly beloved, and stroked the side of her face with wet fingers, which made her giggle softly. "Have... have I ever mentioned how much I adore just the feel of your skin against mine?" he asked her in a low voice.

"Umm, you've mentioned it I think," she said, "but not in any great detail. Tell me more."

Simon controlled his gulp only with difficulty. 'Tell me more' was a game that had gotten him in trouble with Kaylee before, but this time he felt up to the opportunity. "Well, obviously, it's soft, for a start. Poets and lovers have waxed eloquent for millenia on the virtues of soft skin, but I think that there's a happy medium in all things, and you wouldn't want to be TOO soft, with nothing else to say for yourself. There's a kind of a strength to the feel of your skin, and an incredible warmth to it, that always makes me feel weak for the first fraction of a second, and a kind of a muted glow that comes along with the warmth - though I suppose that maybe the glow is off topic, since I started with how it felt, not how it looked, but I think I can be forgiven for straying slightly." And he kissed her again.

"Okay, good skin - soft, strong, warm, glowy, got it. What else??" she probed.

Okay, this was getting trickier. Simon let his mind race to think of other things that he could say, but at the same time he triply reinforced his censoring filter, not wanting to blurt out the wrong thing just because he was nervous. "Your energy and enthusiasm - I know that I've said that one before, but I never stop being blown away by how much you can throw yourself into whatever you're doing, how fully and completely you live every moment of life. It makes me proud that you've chosen to make me a part of that life, and hopeful that I can learn that kind of joie de vie myself, just from being around you." He sighed in relief, knowing that he'd nearly made it home safe. "And the very particular way the edges of your mouth are curving just at this very moment, err, or the one about a second before I said 'moment' actually, because that was when you started to laugh, which is a great thing too, but it isn't the same as an edge-of-the-mouth-only smile."

Kaylee's laugh became predatory in the very best way then, and she turned herself around, holding her torso just an inch or so above Simon's chest, and then collapsed partly onto him because she was using one hand to start tugging down his bathing trunks. "What's a jwaa do vee, anyway?"

"Huh?" It took Simon a few seconds to recognize his own phrase, since Kaylee wasn't getting the pronunciation right. "Oh, it's in... well, it means 'passion for life', more or less." By this point, the wet shorts were down past his knees.

"Oooh, speaking of passion," Kaylee quipped, giving him a steamy hot kiss again and licking at the most sensitive spot that she'd yet found on his neck. "Just how quick do you think you can get this gorram suit off me?"

Once they were back out of the Passion pools building, Simon's chrono was reading nearly midnight in Boros time, but the gate of the landing field was visible down the street. "So," he said, wishing he could reach out to hold Kaylee's hand or put an arm around her, but the bags they were each carrying made this impossible. "Did you grow up in a big family?" She shot him a slightly startled look at the question. "I know - we've talked about a lot of other things, and you've heard some about my family for the obvious reasons, but I've never asked much about what your life was like before you came to Serenity. Hope you don't mind that I'm taking an interest."

"Oh, no, of course not," she insisted quickly. "Just trying to - well, starting with the specific question you asked, I suppose, would be a good place to start, and it's a pretty simple one. Yes, a HUGE family, and me pretty much the baby of them all - six big brothers and two older sisters, along with three cousins on my Daddy's side. Umm... do ye want names and bios for ALL of 'em?"

"Umm, not if you don't want to rhyme it all off right this minute, though I'd like to hear more," he replied after a moment. They got to the gate at this point, and the guard waved them on without demanding a pass, since he was the same one who'd been on duty the night before. "Who was your favorite, or did you have one?"

"Hmm." She considered the question carefully. "Bit hard to say - all of them could frak me off mightily from time to time, and there's a lot of the family that I loved pretty dear the other six days of the week." Simon chuckled. "But maybe it's a good occasion to mention Adan, seeing as he was the one who taught me most of what I know about... well, about trace compression block engines." And she waved up at the shape that they were approaching, not that Simon had needed the hint - really.

"That's what drives Serenity, right?"

Kaylee made a grunt of agreement. "Adan was nineteen when he found the wreck of an Ifrit 4 personnel transport down in the ravine. Wouldn't fly no more without a team of trained aeromautic engineers workin' months on it, but he was gorram sure that he could get the engine turning over again - and put it to a new use. There was an electrical grid in our county, but the generator hadn't been running too steady for years, and... hmm." By this point, they'd gotten to the airlock door, and Kaylee had punched in the simple code that allowed the crew to enter directly under ordinary circumstances. The outer door remained closed. "Hmm... did River feel like she needed to lock herself in?"

"Might not be a bad idea, if she was up in the lounge or anything," Simon said. "Being all alone inside. Seems a bit odd, though."

"Yeah, it's not like we've got somebody just waiting to slip into this well-guarded landing field and..." She broke off and started entering the more complex unlock code, and Simon watched - and then noticed an odd design that had been marked in a pale brown next to the keypad. Where had he seen that mark before? And suddenly, he placed it, and realized the danger, tackling Kaylee and throwing her from the airlock door just as a spark of life flashed from one particular button to her finger...

"Are... are you okay?" Simon asked, not so worried about the - the whatever, as that he might have inadvertently hurt Kaylee himself in his eagerness.

"Err... got the wind knocked out of me, tingles from the top of my head to the toes of my feet, and an odd soreness in my finger, but... but otherwise okay," she assured him. Simon climbed off of her, noticing that her hair looked like it was trying to stand on end, but being still damp, and not having had that much of a static charge, it was just a bit more full-bodied than had been a moment ago. "What - how did you know..."

"The design on the hull next to the airlock," Simon said, pointing at it. "Part of a code system that River worked out when she was seven or so. 'Watch out - boobytrapped.'"

"Well, nice that she warned you a little," Kaylee grumped.

"Probably she expected me to catch on much quicker than that," Simon agreed ruefully. "So - how do we disarm that?"

"Would be hard, from outside," Kaylee muttered. "If River's been as clever as I expect her to be by now. And I don't fancy trying to get to any of the other airlock doors, way we're parked... ooh!" And she withdrew her little communicator device, working on it, and Simon realized that she was establishing a bridge to Serenity's automatic systems. It took a long time to do this, since the electronics had their own security guards and precautions, but finally the doors both opened. "Okay, now the big question - is River here or not?"

"If she's not in her room, then probably she's snuck up to a bounty hunter ship that's hovering unseen right above..." Simon started, and Kaylee shot him a sharp look, not quite sure if he was joking about Jubal Early's visit. "Sorry, umm... I guess trying to draw trends from that occasion isn't the best way to go right now huh?"

River was not in her chamber at the stern of the ship, but there was a quickly scrawled note fastened to her door with a small magnetic circle. "Simon - went book shopping in town. Shouldn't be later than 1645." It was signed with the Chinese ideogram for 'river', which almost made Simon smile, but he was too worried. It was many hours after River had planned to be back, no matter whether she'd meant Boros time or... whatever. What could have kept her for so long? Kayle was right beside, reading the words from around his shoulder, (since she was hardly tall enough to see over,) and he heard a quick gasp in her throat as she wrapped a comforting arm around him.

Simon returned the favor with an arm of his own and took a deep breath. "Okay, let's think this through. River's probably not in any immediate danger - she can take care of herself pretty well after all. What's a smart next step? We probably shouldn't be charging back out into the city to search for her ourselves right away..."

"Um - check for messages on the comm spool?" Kaylee suggested nervously. He stroked her hair with as much reassurance and headed up for the cockpit. They listened to the conversation between Zoe and Mal, and another ramble from Zoe asking if any of them were back yet, and that was it. No spoken message from River, no matter how much Simon really wanted to hear one. Simon was feeling lost and uncertain as he and Kaylee headed back into the cargo bay.

"I... I should probably disable the zapper, now that we're here," Kaylee said, pointing to a panel beside the airlock door. "Doesn't seem to be much reason to leave it on now."

"No, I guess not." He came over to watch the process of this, and ended up helping by holding things. Just as Simon was starting to fasten the panel back in place, a chime rang out, quite loud because they were so near to one of its source speakers - the basic entry notification. Simon could hardly have resisted the impulse to sweep River up in his arms if he'd wanted to, once he saw her face in the airlock inner doorway. "You... you gave us both a big scare, sister mine. What happened?"

"Umm... it's a bit of a long story," River hedged, as Simon let her go and Kaylee indulged in her own flying tackle. (Not as vehement as Simon's save outside.) "I... I went outside of town with a boy - but not just because I wanted to take off or anything. There was somebody looking for me in town."

"Whaa?" Simon breathed. He'd been so sure that the string of people 'looking' for his dear mei-mei had finally come to an end.

"Yeah, don't worry, he didn't find me and he's moved on to check somewhere else," River continued blithely. "And... and I think it's almost a good thing that he was around, because he might have given me part of the key to the message of the Eight."

"The... the eight?" Kaylee repeated, confusion jumping back and forth across her face. "The Academy escapees who Garcia mentioned - they really did send that signal?"

"Of course," River insisted. "Oh, I called Garcia's number from a public cortex booth in the city. We're to meet him aat another tavern tomorrow, around lunchtime. Draco Etamin. I've got the directions."

Simon was completely beyond words with shock and resentment at this point, but River didn't even notice. "Boy, it really is late. I'm off to bed. May sleep in a bit, but not too late." And with that, she headed off towards the passenger dorms, which she would have to herself tonight.

"Don't let her get to you," Kaylee suggested, pulling Simon close by her arm twined around his. "She's doing what any teenager would do, well sortuv, and she has a lot of catching up to do on her rebel years, the way I figure it. Let things be until tomorrow."

"Alright I guess," Simon said softly, and then started guiding her towards their bunk, his mind working faster and faster at different ideas for things that they could do, now that they were alone in that part of the ship. The passion pools had not slaked his lustiness by a long shot.

------------

Mal was startled out of a walking trance when a cool, fresh breeze blew past him and Inara, and kept right on coming. Breathed deeply of it. "Yeah, that's more the stuff."

Inara smiled weakly, tugged the zipper on her jacket down a bit, and took a step away from him, standing on her own. "Yes, I guess that the bad air may have finally started to rise up, so that we're getting fresher stuff coming in from all sides." She looked critically at the horizon in front of them and off to the right a bit. "Don't think that dawn is too far off, and it'll bring some slightly warmer weather with it."

"That's certainly welcome news," Mal muttered. "Can... can we stop and grab a bit of breakfast here, or is it still important to keep driving our poor bodies on?" The snow seemed to be much thinner on the ground by this point, and Mal could see what looked like a few iced-over puddles of water here and there.

"Hmm..." Inara considered that for maybe fifteen seconds, and then took a seat for herself on a rock that was about the right height. "Let's see... self-warming containers of spiced coffee?" she suggested, rooting around in her backpack for the items.

"Yes please," Mal said, sweeping a grassy rise clear of traces of snow opposite Inara and clambering down onto it. He wasn't nearly as high as she was, and thus his gaze seemed to naturally fall about level with the crotch of her pants, which was actually just frustrating since they were more than bulky enough to not show anything. "Umm... we've got syntho-porridge with cinnamon and maple flavors here... want for a helping?"

"Oh, definitely," Inara agreed, so Mal started fiddling with the self-warming pot again. There wasn't enough snow around to dump into it, and he didn't really want to break the ice over a puddle for several reasons, so he used water from his bottle, figuring that they'd be able to refill it soon. "Any notion how far we've gotten since the crash?"

"Hmm..." Mal tried to weigh his impressions of the trip, but all of the dark wanderings were starting to blur together. "Maybe sixteen or seventeen - most of it in the right direction I suppose."

Inara made a face as he opened up his coffee and took a long swallow. "Still a ways to go to reach Kazia's, then, but not as long as we've already come I guess."

"Yes probably." Mal started to root around in his pack again, while keeping an eye on the pot, and came up with the mini communicator. "Well... we're definitely past the jammer from Sanchez' ship - or it's not working anymore," he muttered, after turning on the receptor and going through a calibration routine. "Would you want to try calling your friend??" He tried to phrase it as a casual offer, when in fact the words were anything but.

"Hmm... I do, but we shouldn't," Inara admitted. "No way to tell who else we'd be letting know that we're here - and whether they're friendly or not. We can make a distress call if we're really in serious trouble, but better not to draw any attention to ourselves otherwise."

"Very good." Mal smiled, put the communicator wand back in his pack, and stirred the mush.

"What - did you ask me that as a test?" Inara asked, arching an eyebrow. "To see how naive I was about the practicalities of our situation?"

"Maybe, or something like that." Mal sighed. "I... I know that you're a very practical woman, but that the sort of considerations you have to think about aren't the same as the ones I live with every day. Maybe that sort of thing is going to be as much our problem as opening up the lines of communication, or who ends up bringing home the bacon and how."

"So you're already anticipating what our problems will be, in the affair that we haven't yet had a chance to start indulging in?"

"Um, yeah - what, haven't you?" Mal asked seriously. And started serving out porridge for Inara.

They stayed in that spot for a while, reassured by the fresh wind continuing to blow in towards where Inara had seen the forest fire earlier, and Mal felt some strength returning to his body, which probably had more to do with breathing clean air than eating or drinking. After the porridge, Inara found some crunchy stuff to munch on - imitation potato and pork patties, which weren't great fun, as there was no easy way of heating them up, but the tastes were alright for breakfast-time and he knew that they'd be pretty nutritious for continuing their trek. Mal offered to massage Inara's legs for a bit before they got started again, and she accepted and returned the favor. It wasn't as sensual an experience as most massage, because of the bulky clothes, but it did seem to have helped when they got on the move again.

Not long after that, the first speck of sunrise began to be seen above the Ares horizon. Mal tried to look around and get his bearings with respect to the map in the little computer he'd packed, but the shadows of dawn were still too strange to make much out immediately. They didn't have many other tools for navigation other than that map - Ares had no strong magnetic field, which meant that a compass would tell nothing except the location of any iron ore deposits nearby, and while a good passive sat detector would have been able to figure out some useable info from the Boros Positioning System, they hadn't happened to have such a device on Serenity when he was packing.

"Oooh, that feels better," Inara muttered as more sunlight fell on her and melted the snow at her feet. Stopping for a moment, she quickly shucked her snow boots and insulated overpants, and then started the process of taking off her jacket, which was complicated by the fact that she was wearing the backpack over top of it. For his own part, Mal didn't think that the day side was warm enough yet that he was sure about going around in his ship clothes, but the urge to show solidarity with Inara managed to push him over into getting rid of the heaviest stuff himself. They left it puled up beneath a shrub, where it wouldn't be obvious.

"Uh-oh," Mal said, turning around and getting a glimpse into the distance. Far ahead on the plains, between them and a far-distant spot that might be a house, a bunch of vehicles were spread out. Somehow he could tell that the owners and riders of that convoy weren't up to any particular good.

------------

Zoe crept between the trees as silently as she could, gun carried in both her hands, easily making out Jayne's form ahead of her by light of the stars and of Verbena. If their figuring had been right, it shouldn't be too long until they found the camp at this pace, and...

The choice was between thinking about what would happen then, and avoiding walking into trees. Zoe never even got that close to a tree.

Faint moonslight streaming into a clearing. The slightly stronger glow of a survival heat lamp shining on a small tent, and Zoe really had to exercise control not to scoff. There was no need for anybody to be using a heat lamp in this weather, and he hadn't set it up correctly anyhow. Jayne hesitated on the edge of the clearing, and Zoe crept up to him, whispering very quietly. "I'll go up to the tent - you cover me." This rank a fool might require a bit more subtlety than Jayne could manage.

She scooped up the heat lamp as an impromptu light source, holding it with one hand that was still steadying the front of her rifle. Flung away the door flap of the tent, revealing a sleeping man. Oh, dammit, what was the quarry's name?? "Snowton? Rickard Snowton??" she barked in her loudest and most aggressive soldier voice.

"Huh?" the guy muttered. "What the..."

"By the authority of the Independent Boros Provisional Government, you are hereby bound by law pending an investigation into serious charges of sabotage and theft," Zoe muttered, dropping the lamp and reaching into the tent to pull Snowton out - without the gun that had been in his vicinity inside the tent. "You may not recognize the sovereignity of an Independent government, but they have the support of the Boros people and are de facto..."

"I, I'm not contesting your authority to arrest me," Snowton muttered peevishly. "Just still waking up, and... do you mind if I get my glasses?"

Zoe was in no mood to be taken in. "Jayne?"

"I'll take him," Jayne said, coming closer with a pistol at his side and one strong hand reaching out around neck high. "Get the spectacles and make sure there's no laser beamers inside or nothing."

Zoe let out a sigh, deciding not to argue about whether a weapon really could be concealed in eyeglasses - there were other things that she could check. "Don't rough him up much, okay Cobb? No need for that."

"Ehh, it's not always about a need," he grumbled, but he restrained the man fairly simply with a loop of good strong wire around his wrists, behind his back. Zoe found the glasses, and also recognized what might be the important papers and parts, right there in the tent. She came back out and gently propped the frames up on his nose and ears.

"How... how did you get here? I didn't even hear you..."

"You were asleep, dipwad," Jayne muttered dismissively.

"Yes, I may have nodded off, but still, I'm a very light sleeper," Snowton replied, shaking slightly. "Now, I've been coming to terms with the idea that I wasn't cut out for life as a fugitive, but..."

"Some people are capable of picking it up more quickly than others, I guess," Zoe muttered. "Come on, no reason to dawdle here. Is that all the stuff you took from the Department, there in your tent, Snowton? It would be a bad idea to lie: even if we don't figure it out, there'll be others who will."

"And you don't want to lose out on the full reward," Snowton guessed. "Well, doesn't matter - yes, that's the lot, and I think you can guess I'm not good at lying with a straight face."

Which was the sort of thing a clever liar might make up, Zoe thought, but she didn't waste too much energy on such musings. He was apparently clueless enough to leave all his eggs in one basket, so why not? She gathered up the contents of the tent, and handed some to Jayne, working out what he could hold and still intimidate a prisoner. Then they headed back towards the shuttle.

None of them noticed the sniper, waiting until they got a bit more than halfway there.

----------

"And Miss Frye has to score at least forty-seven points on her third throw," Simon said in an over-the-top Dyton colony accent, "if she's to have any hope of salvaging the round. Silence from the spectators, please."

Kaylee shot him a look, but he stayed quiet from that point on, and there were no other 'spectators' in the lounge area, since River hadn't woken up and come to see what the two of them were doing together in the middle of the night. She might have been very interested in watching, though.

Kayle took the small yellow ball and chucked it in that unusual overhand style that had gotten her a lot of beginner's luck with her first game of Natcher. The ball flew to the board mounted on the wall and stuck fast where it first touched the board's surface - only a few millimeters away from the triple seventeen zone, but not close enough. "Seventeen," Simon announced. "You know what that means."

"Yeah, yeah." Kaylee capitulated with just a bit of bad grace, unfastening the shoulder strap snaps on her coveralls and letting the fabric fall down at her feet. Then a gleam of buried delight shone in her eyes as she noticed that Simon was unable to wrench his gaze from her legs immediately. "New round, and that means it's a whole new game, Tam. Get ready to kiss that shirt goodbye."

"If you beat me, and that's what I choose to take off next, then sure," Simon answered placidly. He unfastened the ball from the board and tossed it back to her. "Loser starts the new round."

Kaylee went for the triple twenty with a backhand, and managed to hit the triple seven, next to it. "Gorram it, last time I go up against you with something you practiced in med school. We shoulda played strip Pony instead."

Simon took his turn shooting, and got the outer bulls-eye. "What's Pony?"

"Umm... it's kinduv like ring-ball, except not regular one-on-one play, just a shooting contest, from various spots on the court, fancier trick shots, and so on."

"Oh, right." Simon remembered seeing Mal and Jayne playing something like that in the cargo bay, and especially the amount of taunting, braggadocio, sly underhanded tricks, and accusations about same, that seemed to accompany each match. "Well, perhaps another night. It's your throw again."

Kaylee went, and got a double fifteen, along with a ten point bonus for straight shooting, which surprised Simon slightly. (He hadn't explained in much detail about the more subtle bonus points.) "Okay, you never finished telling me the story about, umm, about your brother and the first trace compression block engine you worked on."

Kayle smiled and shook her head as she handed him the ball. (Considering the thin clothing she had left, other parts of her body were starting to shake too.) "Gee, now? Umm... well yeah, he had the idea for using it as a generator, to feed into the local electrical system, and I just about begged him to help. Took us over a year and a half to get it running, and we blowed out some transformers. Woulda been quicker work if that hadn't been the year that I discovered an interest in boys, specifically Willam Callan, but..."

"But then you'd have probably blown up ALL the transformers," Simon teased her. "Some of them twice."

"Just throw, doctor."

So Simon went for the triple twenty, and got it. Kaylee made a face, and took the ball to make her last throw. "Would it be too weird for me to ask more about Willam?"

Kaylee nearly flubbed her toss after that one, but steadied and hit the bulls-eye dead on. "Umm... just a bit. I actually love that you're interested, but yeah, talking too much about old flames and such at this point might just be a bigger barrel of grubs than we want to open right now." Simon stepped up to the line and tried to figure out his move. Had to make, what, twenty-seven or more to win? He oriented on the double fourteen. "Though, and this is mighty inconsistent of me, but I sortuv want to know a very general bit of background about you and whether you've HAD any old flames. I mean, well, you sortof know that you're not the first man I've been with..."

"Well, yeah, I had indeed picked that up," Simon admitted. "And if we're just talking about sex, then no, you haven't been my only either, no. I may have always been very focused on some goal - school, my work at the hospital, saving River, keeping her safe... but, well, during the first two stages, there was enough time for the fairer sex."

"Right," Kaylee admitted with a sad smile. "Handsome brilliant medical student, or doctor, probably plenty of Osiris ladies just loved you."

"Maybe, especially before they'd actually met me," Simon joked. "And my parents would have pitched fits if I hadn't been able to find escorts for their society functions. But... but you're the second girl that I've ever loved, Kay Lee, and I think you know who the first was."

"Wha... oh." Kaylee's expression of uncertainty turned into a smile as she got it. "River, of course." Simon nodded, and mode his shot. "Oh, man. Beaten by one point. Simon Tam, you're a showoff... too bad it's just mad skills and not more skin you're showing." And she took off her camisole undershirt, that she'd been wearing underneath the multi-colored top, and focused on the next round with intense determination.

It didn't do her that much good. About twenty minutes, Simon had finally taken off his shirt, but Kaylee was completely bare, and playing to avoid having to complete whatever dare Simon might demand of her if he won another round. That was when a siren started to blare.

"Emergency signal!" Kaylee cried, running up towards the cockpit from force of habit. Simon thought of scooping up some of their clothes before following. "Um, it... either River hit the red button in her room, or it's being relayed in from one of the shuttles. Mal and Inara, on Ares, or Jayne and Zoe, up in the hills."

"And - and if it's either shuttle, we're going to need to lift off and rendezvous with them," Simon realized. Kaylee turned around to look at him, and simon tossed her her shirt and panties. "You check in the cockpit, I'm going to grab River. She's the only one who knows how to fly her, right?"

"Umm, well, I mean I could try, but it's better with her, yeah," Kaylee admitted. "And HURRY!"

Simon did indeed hurry. He knew that the emergency warning wouldn't have been sounded without dreadful reason. Passing the infirmary, (where he suspected he'd be hard at work soon enough,) he saw River hurrying out of her room. "River, you okay?" he managed to gasp out, and she hardly noticed the question. "We... we have to fly and help..."

With that, she blew right past him, running for the cockpit at a speed that Simon couldn't possibly have matched. Well, that was probably for the good. He was in the dining room when Serenity shuddered slightly and took to the air. "Where, where are we goi..." he panted, upon finally arriving at the bridge.

"Mountains," Kaylee replied, hugging him hard. She had found time to get partly dressed again, though Simon still held his pants in his hand. "We... we can't raise anyone in shuttle two, and can't even get a signal at all from shuttle one. Even from Ares, we should've been able to get a carrier - Inara's friend is on the near side right now."

"Well... first things first," Simon muttered. A definite emergency was more important than a mysterious disappearance, though neither were good signs. "How long until we're there at the mountains?"

"Just five or seven minutes at this speed," River said absently.

"Well, then I'd better make sure that the infirmary is prepped," Simon said. Really he just wanted to find something to do to keep himself busy.

"No, don't go just yet," Kaylee muttered, holding onto his arm.

"But... but I need to do something," he muttered, and then thought of something. "We're actually on a friendly planet! I'll call into the Boros authorities, let them know that something went wrong. They might be able to help."

------------

The clearing wasn't big enough to land Serenity right next to the shuttle, but there was another empty one nearby. Rushing back towards the shuttle, they found Zoe and Jayne about half way there along a path. Both of them had been shot, Jayne twice - still alive, but fading fast. Zoe's hand was still wrapped around the panic button that she had used, along with shuttle two's comm relay, to call for help. "Okay, forget the shuttle for now," Simon muttered, trying to think. "And there's no time to move them now - got to do what we can to stop the blood loss and the shock first."

"Doc - doctor?" Zoe said softly, surprising him. He hadn't even realized that she was still conscious.

"Yeah, don't worry," he told her. "You're going to be okay."

"Not... not so much worried about me," she whispered with an odd intensity. "Don't... don't let me lose the baby."

"What?" Simon dropped the bandage that he'd been getting ready.

"Baby?" Kaylee echoed. "You... you've got Wash's baby? Why didn't you tell us yet?"

"Because - because it's bad luck," River whispered in a grim voice, as Zoe closed her eyes.

TO BE CONTINUED... 


	7. Chapter 7

Part Seven

"Are you sure you're alright back there?" Inara called. "Those sounds that you're making don't seem too natural."

Mal shook his head, silently wishing that he'd decided to walk further into the woods to take care of a call of nature - but he hadn't wanted to get out of easy earshot of Inara just in case something horrible happened to her while he was - occupied. (Not that he'd have been in the best shape to charge out and save her even if he knew that she was in trouble, in the middle of this situation, but...) So now something reasonably horrible was happening to him. Oh well. "Yeah, I'm fine, and nearly done with what I've gotta do. Just stand by."

"Yeah, well, I wasn't really planning on anything else, just try to keep it down, okay? That is simply not attractive stuff." Mal shook his head and got on with it.

After finishing his business, and cleaning up as scrupulously as he could under the circumstances, (which were pretty good actually,) Mal emerged from the stand of trees clustering around a small stream and re-evaluated the situation. "Okay, I don't guess that we can circle around to stay further away from those folks any longer - we'd be just heading along the edge of that clifftop, and there's no easy way down. If we head directly for Kazia's place from here - it's not too far, and the caravan is still a lot of miles off."

"But they'll see us," Inara pointed out. "And they'll be able to come and investigate pretty quickly, if they have a mind to."

"Yes, that's true," Mal pointed out. "Is there any alternative, though??"

"I'd better keep the communicator close," Inara muttered. "Just in case we have nothing to lose by sending out a message."

"Hmm." Mal considered that. "Yeah, good enough. And let's go." So they headed out onto a wide plain, covered with engineered grass whose leaves were dark purple. "Need anything to munch on?"

"No, I don't think so. Grabbed a biscuit while you were... busy," she said. "Maybe we should talk about something else."

"Hmm." Mal considered that. "Well, I can't really keep track what I've told and not yet revealed in the story of my sordid past, but..."

"Tell me about the war," Inara blurted out. "I... I mean, I think that I'm ready to hear, if you're ready to talk. Tell me - about Serenity Valley."

"I... I'm not sure," Mal muttered, and she looked over at him. So suddenly he was talking about the turning point of the battle, as he'd seen it, about the desperate last stand he, and Zoe and several others had made, waiting for the air support that might lead them on to a tide of victory, about the daring sortie that they had made to capture an Alliance anti-aircraft gun that might have shot down the Independent angels, had turned that mighty weapon against their creators.

But all of his bravery and success had made no difference, for the Angels that had arrived hadn't been flying his colors, hadn't been independents, but alliance, far too many to ever shoot down all of them, and shortly after that, the word had come that the Independents had sued for peace, that leaders of both sides were in negotiations. And while the talking was going on, both sides had remained stranded in Serenity Valley...

"Mal," Inara broke in, and he looked up to see two trucks from the caravan heading quickly towards them. There was no point in trying to hide, so he stopped and waited for them to arrive. "What... what do we..."

"Try and follow my lead, once I make one," Mal muttered under his breath to her, and then raised his voice. "Hello, gentlemen. I don't suppose any of you could give us a free ride over yonder??"

"What are you doing here??" a man with a grizzled beard demanded, jumping out of the shotgun seat of the first van - and if the gun he was carrying wasn't an actual shotgun, it was as long and dangerous looking as one.

"Umm, just passin' through, you might say," Mal said. "Were just meaning to fly over and meet with Miz Laurentis, but had a spot of trouble back there and got crash-landed. Been trekkin' this far for hours, nearly got frozen solid during the lunar-night and..."

"You gorram idjits," someone else from the same van growled - not the driver, he'd been riding in back. "Set the forests on fire and used up a province's worth of air. It'll take a long time to make that up, too."

"Unintentional, and I'm sorry for any inconvenience I've caused you folk," Mal muttered. Would the lack of air really have that much effect so far from the crash? "Maybe we'd just better keep going on our way, and then..."

"Did I say that you could go on your way?" Grizzled beard demanded. "Aside from the matter of the fire and the air, this is our range. Nobody passes through without paying our toll."

Mal's spirits sank. It was starting to become clear what sort of people he was dealing with... and they didn't have much of value to buy them off with in trade. "We don't have much of value - we didn't come here for commerce, and only rescued enough from the shuttle to make it where we need to go alive."

"Is that one a colleague of Laurentis'?" the driver of van one asked, pointing directly at Inara. "She could pay the toll off in trade for both of you, easily enough."

"That's not going to happen," Mal snapped, before even thinking about it. "The first one to lay a hand on the lady will regret it." But he was feeling very bad about all of this. Nearly a dozen people were facing them now, including two women who hadn't tried to stop the 'taking out in trade' talk - in fact, one of those females was looking at Inara with nearly as much hunger as most of the men.

"Mal, come on," Inara said. "I... I appreciate the attempt to defend my honor, but remember how that worked out last time..."

"No," he insisted. "I... I may have to accept you practicing your trade when it's your own free choice, but I will not stand by and watch you be pressured into it under circumstances like this..."

"If you try to fight us, it'll just go the worse for you - and the more she'll have to pay us," Grizzled beard insisted. "We've got a lot more guns than you, wayfaring stranger, and plenty of sharp eyes."

"If you shoot or lay a hand on either of them," a new voice boomed out, amplified over speakers, "then there will shortly be none of you left."

Everybody looked up at the new arrival. A flying vehicle, larger than either of the vans, was hovering about ten feet above the plain, and several large weapons projected from it. "Everyone but Malcolm Reynolds or Inara Serra should leave the vicinity NOW," the aircar's loudspeakers said with an unmistakeable voice of command. The plains rangers didn't seem so certain that it could take them all down, but one of the drivers seemed to signal the opinion that the entire deal was now far more trouble than it was worth, and with a lot of grumbling and face-saving backtalk the vans were loaded up again and drove back towards the distance. Once they had made about a quarter-mile the aircar landed, and a door panel slid open, revealing a lovely woman with chestnut brown hair in an elegant robe. "Inara!"

"Kazia!" Inara exclaimed with relief, rushing forward to embrace her friend. "Kazia, umm, this is..." 

"Captain Mal Reynolds, so nice to meet you," she said, stretching forward a hand towards Mal. "And that you're safe."

"Umm, likewise I'm sure, Miss Laurentis," Mal agreed, taking the offered handshake. "Somewhat convenient timing, though... you didn't send out a message did you Inara?"

"No, I... I didn't realize that things were going wrong until too late, and you had the communicator," Inara pointed out.

"I didn't need a signal that obvious," Kazia answered. "Had spotted two backpackers heading towards the estate and was getting ready to investigate, offer you a lift if it was you. I've been VERY concerned since you didn't show up on time - that isn't like my 'Nara." She sighed. "And then, on our way, we saw the Pavee - the wandering people - giving you trouble. Come on." She urged them into the aircar at this point. Mal saw that it was fairly small but at least as spacious as the Serenity shuttles inside, and there was a man at the flight controls who didn't turn around as they came in. Mal wasn't at all sure if that guy and Kazia would have been able to fight off the Pavee, but at least her bluff had made good.

"So, are those 'travelling people' the reason you have an air car so solidly armed?" he asked conversationally.

"Yes, there have been a few unpleasant incidents," Kazia said offhandedly. "Home, Brent, and hand me the communicator so I can call back in."

-------------

"Okay, umm, yeah River, just lay him down there," Simon muttered. Some of the things about his sister's transformation still took him off guard - like the way a tiny little slip of a girl could carry a huge muscular man like Jayne Cobb without any apparent problems, while it was all that K and himself had been able to do to bring Zoe into the ship together. "Err... maybe you should take off, and bring us back to the city now. We can run someone over here to bring the shuttle back later."

"No, not yet," River insisted, shaking her head slightly at him. "Not until I know if I'm needed - for transfusions."

"Oh, right," Simon muttered, admitting that he should have thought of that much himself. Both patients were low on blood, there were very few potential donors, and he probably wouldn't be able to risk donating himself, since there was too much for him to do. (And should River be piloting the ship after she'd given blood herself? Well, he trusted her to be able to make that decision herself.) "Well, Jayne's in more need of it right now... and he's O neg. The hardest type of all to match."

"Really?" Kaylee put in. "Is O negative rare? I kind of thought..."

"No, it's not particularly rare," Simon explained tersely, "but in emergencies transfusions don't have to be from type to identical type. Generally blood without a particular antigen can be given to somebody who shows that antigen, but not the other way around. O negative has none of the most common antigens, so it's known as the universal donor - can be given away to just about anybody, but someone with O neg can only get a transfusion from another person of the same type."

"And both Simon and I got A plus factors from our parents," River said in disappointment. "Like the grades that they expected us to keep up."

"Then you should keep some of that universal donor blood here," Kaylee pointed out, and raised an eyebrow at Simon's shocked expression. "Hey, if you're entitled to make helpful suggestions about stocking my engine room, bud, then it goes both ways. I don't mind bleeding this time, but my own life may depend on this place being stocked with universal donor blood, if somethin' happens to me again, and neither Jayne nor another O neg donor are available..."

Simon couldn't help but smile slightly. "You're O neg? Now how could I have remembered Jayne's type, but not yours??"

"Dunno, but there's no time for more chatter," Kaylee pointed out, extending her arm, the inside of her elbow exposed. "Sterilize me and tap me... cause Jayne ain't getting any healthier by laying there and waiting for it." Simon hurried to comply.

It was nearly an hour before he was sure that both patients had stabilized, having done his usual surgeries to extract the one bullet that was still lodged inside Jayne and stich up the wounds as well as possible. River had returned Serenity from the mountains to her spot in the central spaceport, but Simon had declined to ask for emergency medical services, though he'd established a remote link with a hospital to get a quick consult on his patients.

"Okay, so one crisis is resolved?" River asked from the infirmary door. He looked up at her. All three of them now had little bandages on the inside of their elbows - both he and River had given blood for Zoe, who was an AB positive, in the hopes that neither of them would be too badly affected in anything they had to do by the lack of blood. Kaylee had eaten to keep her strength up after giving up quite a lot for Jayne, and was lying down.

"Umm, yeah, I guess so. Pretty sure that they'll both be okay, though neither Zoe or Jayne have woken up yet." Simon suddenly realized what was coming next. "The captain, and Inara - they'd gone missing, right??"

"I... I found something that looks like crash wreckage, scanning Ares moon along their flight planned course," River said in a small voice. "Don't think that any authorities have been there to investigate yet. Do we head up there??"

"Hmm." Simon wasn't sure that a hard burn up to the moon would be a great thing for his patients - though he would be willing to approve it if it was the only way to help Mal and Inara. "Umm, one thing first - have you tried calling Inara's companion friend? She might have news of them."

"Oh, right," River made a face. "Can't believe that I didn't think of that one myself. Maybe you'd better come and do the talking."

"Sure." It took a bit of doing to find the right path down the Cortex to reach Kazia Laurentis' estate, and even then Simon could only get as far as some young lady who was either a receptionist or a personal secretary. He said that he was interested in finding out about Mal Reynolds or Inara Serra.

"You're calling from their ship, Serenity, yes?" She pushed buttons, obviously verifying his own Cortex path. "Very well. Reynolds and Miz Serra are en route to the estate, and should arrive within twenty minutes or so. Would you like me to take a message for Mister Reynolds to contact you as soon as possible?"

"Umm..." Simon let out a breath of relief, though a tiny voice of doubt kept him from taking this woman's word entirely. Still, she worked for someone who Inara had trusted. "Not ASAP, but when convenient for him to call, yes," Simon said. "Do... do you know anything about what happened to him? Their current medical condition?"

"I... I do not have much information along those lines, Mister Tam. There was a... an unscheduled landing of some sort, and neither of them were able to communicate immediately. Miss Laurentis has not indicated that medical care should be standing by when her car returns, so I presume that their physical condition is satisfactory."

Simon wasn't sure that he would presume this far, but then he didn't know Miss Laurentis himself. "Alright. Have either of them call when they can."

"Certainly, sir." And the conversation ended at that point.

"It... it's been an eventful day and night," River put in - she'd been watching and listening just offscreen. "I... I can sleep up here, though, if you want me to be able to answer immediately when a call comes in. The pilot's chair is pretty comfy."

"I... you don't have to do that, but I guess I would appreciate it," Simon admitted. "Thanks, little sister."

"Heck, it's better than having to go all the way back aft," she quipped. "Say hi to Kaylee for me."

Simon shook his head as he headed back towards the infirmary. Zoe was stirring again when he looked in, asking about her baby again, and Simon was hit by a wave of dizzyness. He'd managed to avoid thinking about this part while working to make sure that Zoe and Jayne would both be alright, but now...

"How - how did you know that you were pregnant?" he finally managed to ask her.

"I... I just knew. There was... was a certainty inside me," she managed to mutter.

"You didn't take a personal test kit or any such thing?" She shook her head. "Well... this may be hard to hear, but I've run blood tests, and I've even tried to do an ultrasounding. Zoe, you're not pregnant, and... and though I can't be sure, it doesn't seem too likely that you were pregnant this morning when you headed out with Jayne."

Zoe's face instantly became very cold and hard. "Your... your tests are wrong." That sentence hung in the air threateningly. "I... I don't mean - if I've loste the baby then I've lost him, and I don't blame you for that. Might've happened before you could even get to us. But - but I had him with me, inside me. I know that."

Simon decided not to argue the point. As Zoe closed her eyes again, he blurted out, "You know, if you wanted to... to mother Wash's child, then - then this wasn't your last chance."

That made her eyes pop open. "And just what do you mean by that??"

Simon almost wished that he hadn't spoken, realizing that he'd committed himself to breaking doctor patient confidentiality for a dead man. But then - this was his widow, and didn't she have a right to know? Wash couldn't tell her himself any more. "After we left, umm, Nandi's house on that little moon that I can't remember the name of, Wash came to me and asked - well, basically, he wanted me to do tests to make sure that he could father a child well enough."

Zoe's brow knitted as she tried to figure out the meaning of this. "And... and so he gave you a - a sample?" She shook her head slightly. "We - we had a fight about having kids while we were there on Ita." Simon nodded, silently thanking her for filling in the place name that he hadn't been able to remember. "He didn't want to."

"Well, maybe he was just checking to be sure," Simon pointed out. "In case he lost the argument."

"Hmm." Zoe sighed. "And I didn't keep pressing the point after we left. Well, movin' back to the point, what's left of the sample that you didn't need for the tests? Has it been in here the whole time?"

"No, and that's probably a good thing, what with all that Serenity's been through in the meantime," Simon pointed out. "Wash insisted on letting it out into space - reflective coating, so it would stay nice and frozen inside. I... I don't know exactly where it'd be by now, but if we go over the navagation logs of the ship, maybe there'd be a way to figure that out."

"Well, thank you for letting me know," Zoe said. It wasn't quite a dismissal, but Simon didn't want to extend this conversation too much himself.

"Goodnight, and get any sleep you can," he said, moving across the room to check Jayne, who seemed to be deep in REM, (what that man might dream of Simon didn't want to think on,) and left the infirmary. Kaylee was lying curled up on a couch in the lounge, still without any pants on, though the shirt was long enough to cover her well past the waist. He let his fingers caress her face and brush through her hair a few seconds, and she stirred, smiling up at him.

"Everything shiny?" she asked hopefully.

"I think so. Jayne and Zoe are going to be okay, and Mal and Inara have turned up on Ares. I reckon that they'll have some adventures to tell us about when they get back, but they're all right." He paused, something occuring to him. "The shuttle, on the other hand, may have had a lot of bad luck."

"Oh, no," K groaned, almost comically intense in her dismay. "What've they gone and done to it? Shuttle one was always the nicest... and Inara usually took good care of it? I wonder if the captain insisted on trying to fly her."

"Couldn't say," Simon admitted, sitting down next to her as Kaylee shifted to a more upright position. "But what do you say we head back to our bunk now, darling mine?"

"M-maybe," she admitted. "There's something that we're still forgetting - ooh, the other shuttle! It's just asking for trouble to leave it parked up in the mountains there... we should fly up and dock it into its berth."

"That - that can wait until morning," Simon insisted, helping Kaylee up and walking with her towards the stairs. "Or - well, I can remind River, and she can do it if she feels up to it. You and I, though, K - we need to actually get some rest."

"Yeah, I guess that we do at that," she admitted, caressing his shoulder and leaning into him.

----------

"Welcome to my home," Kazia said, as she led Mal and Inara from the aircar's garage down a richly furnished hallway. "Mister Reynolds, I believe that Serenity would like to hear from you as soon as possible. A Mister Simon Tam called when we were en route in..."

"Doctor Simon Tam," Mal corrected absently, not entirely sure why he was insisting on giving Simon his full honors. Maybe because, in an odd way, they reflected on him. "The ship's medic - a good man."

"Undoubtedly," Kazia agreed. "I realize that both of you would probably appreciate food and rest, but there are a few matters that must be..."

"Surely the business that I have come for is already almost complete, Kazia my sister," Inara interrupted. "I have come, and you have obviously recognized me. You can send a message to the Guild confirming that I am alive, and here in the Boros system..."

"I'm afraid that the business you have come for is not what you thought it was, dear Inara," Kazia said solemnly, and Inara blinked in surprise. "The report of your death was not in good faith, I am afraid - it was lodged simply for the purpose of constructing a credible rationale to draw you here without anyone suspecting - and they hoped that Reynolds or others of his crew would accompany you. Nobody anticipated the actions of Jesse Sanchez or the other events that you have told me of - but you are here, and they are eager to here your testimony about Miranda, among other things."

"What?" Mal exclaimed, his own mind reeling now. "THEY? Who are they?"

They had arrived in a large sitting room, and for answer a door opened and five very lovely women of different ages and descriptions emerged, wearing glittering white dresses. Inara's jaw dropped, though she seemed to be trying to mouth words. "What's going on?" Mal asked her in a stage whisper.

"A... a full Guild Curia?" Inara managed to breathe, the words a question more than an answer to Mal's. "The Supreme priestesses of.. of the five inner worlds - Londinium, Sihnon, Osiris, Ariel, and Liann Jiun - come here to one of the moons of Boros? But why??"

"Because great events have begun, which require us to abandon our usual focus on our own planets," one of the priestesses said, a blonde girl who seemed no older than Kaylee. Could the Companion's Guild leader of one of the core worlds really be so young - or did the Guild have the medical technology to make its leaders look young again even after they had grown old? Certainly they would have reasons to be interested in such things.

"It is our way to hear witness testimony seperately, even under such circumstances," one of the other ladies said - she was older, maybe even a few years older than Inara, and had hair even darker than she. "I believe that we will speak with Companion Serra first, and Captain Reynolds may use the Cortex screen to reassure those on his vessel."

"Yes, but one thing to settle first," a third of the Curia put in. "Mister Reynolds, we have no direct authority of sub poena over you, since you have no formal affiliation with the Guild. Will you speak of your experiences with us, especially on the matter of what you discovered on the planet Miranda? We have the welfare of all the Companions all over the 'verse to weigh in the balance."

Mal hesitated only a moment, but the second supreme priestess put in again, "Is there anything that we can offer as a compensation for your honest witness?"

Inara was looking daggers at him now. "I'll tell you what you want to know, I think, and we need not speak of rewards - yet."

"Very well," a fourth Curia member said with an authoritative tone. "Companion Serra, come with us." And Inara was led away through the door that the Curia had come from.

"The Cortex interface is available over there," Kazia said to mal, pointing to a painting on the wall of the sitting room - a painting with a few knobs and buttons underneath it - obviously, it was just a default image for when the interface wasn't in active use. Mal went over to use the screen, his mind still reeling from the notion that they had been maneuvered here because of the damn Miranda broadcast - would he ever live that down?

"Oh, hi Mal," River said to him over the Cortex a moment later. "No, Simon and Kaylee have gone to bed, and - well, there's something you need to know about Jayne and Zoe. Kinduv got themselves shot, but they're much better now. I'm just heading off to collect shuttle two now..."

----------

Getting on for dawn, Amarra time, River headed down to the Infirmary from the bridge. Zoe was sleeping peacefully, but Jayne was awake this time. "What the heck happened? Am I alright?"

River sighed slightly. "There was a shooter - left you for dead up in the mountains, except that Zoe pushed the panic button, and we got to you before you bled to death. My brother and Kaylee saved your life - again."

"Hmm." Jayne thought about that. "And the shooter took the guy, and the goods?"

"Um, guess so - they weren't still around. Left the shuttle."

"Gorram it, so much for the sweet payday."

"Well, we'll see," River said, cocking her head slightly. "And you're not the only ones who ran into trouble - Jesse Sanchez ambushed Mal's shuttle, crashlanded him and Inara on Ares, though Mal turned things around so that he died in the landing and they survived. Had a hard trek to make it to safety."

"Hmm." Jayne considered that. "So are we down a shuttle?"

"Leave it to you to ask about that, but probably yeah. Mal wasn't too sure, but it may have to get sold into scrap - along wth Sanchez's ride."

"Hmm, that leaves us without nearly enough escape seats in case of another mechanical emergency, deep space," Jayne commented, "but I guess we'll work that one out later. Anything else interesting - those guys you were meeting with this morning?"

"Yesterday morning," River corrected. "Um, actually yeah - clues about other people who escaped the Academy, like me. We're not sure what they were being trained in, but... I want to try and find them. Have another meeting with the guy today at noon."

"Hmm." Jayne thought. "Can I tag along, if I'm feeling up to it?"

"Sure." River laughed softly. "Oh, and I met a guy in the city - pretty cute. We spent some time out in the country, near a cabin."

"Hmm?" Jayne's reaction sounded almost disappointed. River giggled to herself.

----------

"Very well, Mister Reynolds, I think that that's all we need from you." Mal sighed and relaxed. After waiting nearly three hours for Inara to finish her own testimony, he'd been in here for about two himself.

"Alright, I hope it's been helpful."

"Very much so," the young blonde, who he'd learned was Amina Relonn, the Supreme priestess of Ariel, said. "Mister Reynolds, you indicated that we would be speaking of rewards later. Is now the time?"

"Uh, I suppose so," Mal muttered, realizing that he might not get a better one to make his pitch. "This isn't something material for myself that I'm asking for, but on Inara's behalf, since you represent the ultimate authority in the Guild, as I understand it..."

"You need say no more," The Sihnon priestess told him.

"Are - are you sure? I'd hate to get misunderstood at a time like this..."

"No, a wink is as good as a nod," she assured him. "The fact that you wanted to ask while she was not in the room clinches it. Companion leaders must be well trained in reading secrets, and I think we know what you desire more clearly than you yourself do." She touched a small control. "Could you send Companion Serra back in, please?"

Soon Inara was standing next to Mal, a curious look on her face. "This part of our inquiry is at an end," the Londinium priestess declared. "First, an outstanding debt must be paid. The number one shuttle of Serenity has been investigated, and determined to be beyond repair. Since the damage occured while the two of you were travelling here to meet with us, it is our obligation to replace the vehicle. We weren't able to duplicate the exact model year, but a 2513 Thunderhawk shuttle is equally reliable and will fit in the Firefly oh-three's shuttle docks. It will be landing at the estate within the hour, and you can use it to travel back to Amarra city on the planet below. Is that suitable?"

"Umm... yes, definitely," Mal blurted out, stunned by the grace with which they had offered him a remarkably expensive upgrade as 'replacement.' Even Kaylee, who didn't have much good to say about recent alliance ships, had been impressed with the Thunderhawk's design he remembered.

"Well enough," the Liann Jium priestess put in. "Are you interested in the findings of our council, so far?"

"Of course," Inara said quickly.

"We have grave reasons to fear that the perfect political stability of the inner worlds will soon fail," she said somberly. "Preparations are already underway to move as much of the membership as practical to more distant worlds."

"You - you're going to pull the Guild out of the core?" Mal repeated, struck again by the enormity of it. "That might hasten the collapse that you're worried about."

"Even so, it must be done for reasons of safety," the Sihnon priestess said. "Companion Serra, the dispatches of your travels through the more distant planets have been immensely valuable in coming to this decision, and having the best possible information on such worlds will become even more valuable. For this reason, it pleases this council to offer you work as a paid scout and informant on our behalf."

That nearly floored Inara, Mal could tell. "So I wouldn't be taking appointments directly any more?"

"That would be at your discretion, however you would not need to rely on clients as a source of income and to meet your membership requirements, as long as you were travelling and sending us news."

"Umm, thank you," Inara managed to get out. "It is a remarkably generous offer, and I accept of course."

"Excellent. We stand now in recess, and go now to confer with Companion Laurentis," the Osiris priestess, by far the quietest one, announced.

"I... I need to speak with Captain Reynolds alone," Inara suddenly blurted out.

"If you ask one of Companion Laurentis' staff, I imagine they will be able to oblige you in that," the Sihnon priestess pointed out, and Inara blushed prettily. "And let them know whether or not you want to be notified when the shuttle has arrived."

And with that, Inara swept out of the chamber through the door to the sitting room that they had both used. Mal followed a bit uncertainly, only just catching her demand to be shown into a private room, and hearing that she didn't want to be disturbed for anything, especially not the shuttle arriving. The butler showed them to a richly furnished room on the second floor with a big bed in it. Mal raised his eyebrows at that.

"Did - did you ask for this?" Inara asked him. "For me to get this scouting position so that I wouldn't have to take clients?"

"Umm... no," Mal muttered. "But I honestly do have some notion that they did it because they thought it would suit my wishes better than whatever I was about to ask for." He sighed and sat down on a sort of backless cushioned chair. "Pretty savvy at that, come to think of it."

"Oh." Inara sat opposite him, at the edge of the bed. "Guess I should have expected that they'd pull something like that." She sighed. "And... and I guess I appreciate the opportunity, and will tone it down while we're sorting things out, but I won't quit the usual line of work entirely. I'm not built like that."

"Fair enough," Mal agreed. "Wonder where we'll be heading next, so that you can file your first official scouting report."

"Don't know, unless somebody's found more work down on Boros."

"I don't think so," Mal put in. Quickly he brought her up to speed on what River had told him of the attack on Zoe and Jayne, and that they were both recovering well.

"That's good I guess, though it's too bad if they lose the bounty," she said awkwardly. "I'm glad of them replacing the shuttle at least - maybe I should move into it - it'll be my working space when I take on clients, as it was before, and our secret passion nest the rest of the time. That is - if you can deal with such an arrangement."

Mal smiled. "I think that I can make the necessary adjustments. And it does occur to me that we've got a workable passion nest right here, for a few hours at least."

"Well, obviously," Inara agreed, her face spreading into an inviting grin. "Hurry up and take me, my pirate lover."

"Pirate lover??" Mal repeated dubiously, stopped halfway to his feet.

"It, umm, it's -- that's one story from the training house I didn't tell you about I suppose," Inara said. "Sheydra said that stories had been circulating among the girls about me and the pirate lover I'd had before coming to the school - especially one particularly torrid escapade involving making love in an ancient temple that was burning all around us." She sighed. "Almost seemed to be adding insult to the fact that I was feeling sorry that you'd never even wrapped me into your arms."

"So is that your fantasy about me now?" Mal stood up, grinning, and sat down on the bed, not quite next to her. "A pirate? Am I brutal and savage??"

"Not brutal." Inara smiled, playing along. "Determined and a little bit forceful."

"I have to posess you now," Mal said, reaching for Inara and no longer sure if he was acting out a role play or simply admitting to his own desires. "This has been much too long in coming."

"Far too long," Inara admitted, bringing her lips to his for a kiss that hit him like a concussion grenade. Without pulling apart, he realized that each of them were forcibly tearing off the other's clothes. Mal held her as firmly as he could and bore that lovely body down onto the clean sheets, underneath his own. As much as Inara had probably been trained in artfully passive responses, he didn't want her to have to use any of her training on him, this one time, if she didn't want to. The idea came into his head that after subtly pulling the reins of her amorous encounters with so many paying clients, once she had learned enough to do so, (if she hadn't known how from the very first time she'd seen a client as a teenaged girl,) something deep inside Inara Serra might be crying out for a man who could, very considerately, control her. Who could truly have his way with her in bed, and in the process give her something that she had never been able to receive from a john, because she was too busy giving of herself to receive.

Mal hoped that he were up to that challenge, as he began to run his lips over her so-smooth and slightly fragrant skin.

TO BE CONTINUED...


	8. Chapter 8

Part Eight

At quarter past eleven the next day, River and her party were already waiting in a large private booth at the Draco Etamin tavern. Jayne hadn't recovered enough to make the trip, to his disappointment, (though he hadn't stubbornly contested his doctor's orders more than once,) and he had stoically refused to let anyone else stay aboard Serenity to keep him company - therefore, the group was made up of River herself, Simon, Kayle, and Zoe.

The tavern was fairly busy and noisy, however a number of these booths seemed to have been constructed with soundproofing in mind - probably a reason that Garcia had suggested meeting here. Zoe had even used a bug detector on the table and seats, the walls of the small alcove that they all sat in, and had found no signs of outside observation. So they waited.

"Wonder when the captain and Inara will be getting back here," Kaylee said in a soft voice. "Didn't think that they'd have to stay long up on the moon."

"Well, Inara's friend probably wants to show them proper hospitality," Zoe pointed out, "especially in light of what happened on their way there. A little crashland and some backpacking may not seem like much of a big deal to us, but to some settled Companion lady, it must seem like they nearly died." Simon choked slightly at that sentiment. "Well, I know that they could have died in the crash, but - you know."

"Yeah, I guess I do," Simon muttered. River knew that he wouldn't be sanguine about Mal and Inara until they were back on Serenity and he could check over their blood himself - or something like that.

"So, River," Kaylee said, a bit too brightly, trying to change the subject. "You said that you met a guy yesterday? What's he like?"

"Umm... actually, I just picked him up because I needed a ride out of the city," River admitted, "but he was kinduv cool. Around my age, really smart, and his name is... oh, wait." Something that had been nagging at River suddenly snapped into focus - somebody crossing the room towards them.

"Unusual name," Zoe joked.

"Hello again," Simon put in as Garcia stepped up and took his seat, alone this time.

"Okay, my ship is leaving in an hour and a half, so let's make this quick. You got something new for me, little girl?" he said, looking at River.

"Umm... I'm not sure," she hedged. The complexity of Garcia's mind was coming at her more and more strongly, without her wanting to delve into it, and the sensation was making her dizzy. "Can - umm, can I see the message one more time?"

"Okay, I guess." Garcia made a big production of digging through his bag, while Simon shot River an inquiring look - apparently he knew her well enough to tell that something was wrong, though nobody else was noticing. Garcia produced the plastic sheet and sent it around to River.

As soon as she saw it, everything snapped into focus - well, better focus than before, anyway - including the important thing about Garcia's mind. She continued staring at the words before her, trying to memorize as much of the message as possible while maintaining a slightly puzzled, pensive look on her face. Finally she passed it back. "Sorry, I - I thought I'd have something, but no."

"No hints at all?" Garcia seemed to be very upset at having come down here for nothing. "Umm, I think that I can manage a rendezvous with..."

"I don't think that will help," River blurted out, and suddenly she couldn't struggle against an urge to get away! Quickly rising to her feet, she slipped out of the booth, and rushed towards the nearest side exit from the building. Once she was out in the open air, she felt able to breathe and relax a bit more. Turning around, she wasn't too surprised to see Simon hurrying over to her.

"What... what is it?" he asked. "You know something - I'm sure that you do. Why not tell Garcia what it is?" He hesitated. "Is it something as horrible as Miranda was?"

She had to give him a faint smile in reply. "No, though the implications are... unsettling. I can't tell Garcia - that's part of what I know." River lowered her voice. "He's under and influence. If - if the man you knew as Garcia gets concrete evidence to where the Eight are, he will report them to... I'm not sure who. Somebody connected with the Parliament or the Academy - those who were funding it."

"Garcia's an alliance agent?" Simon exclaimed, a little too loud. "Umm, sorry. But - that's hard to believe."

"He's not an agent - agents know who they're setting out to betray, they realize it," she corrected him in an undertone. "Garcia has no idea that anybody's got to him - but he'd doom them all the same. I'm just lucky that his orders made no mention of narcing on me."

"So - you mean he's been conditioned somehow?" Simon said, getting it. "Behavioural modification triggers or something similar. If the people who were running the..." He shied away from exactly what they were running. "If they can do that..."

"I don't think that there are too many with that kind of control, and they're probably most worried about keeping their own anthills standing up now," River pointed out now. "Oh, good, he's leaving."

"Alright," Simon said, smiling and not questioning how she knew that. "Should we go back in, or do you want to tell me what else you found out now?"

"Ehh, both, it won't take long to tell you now," she said, falling into step next to him. "One is that we should go to Hera first. That's part of the message. I'm not sure if we'll be able to find them there or just another clue, but that's where it said to go - and I do feel as if the message is mine to take now, even if it wasn't sent to me."

"Okay." Simon sighed. "You realize that if we're staying with Serenity, we don't get the final vote in where it goes, right? Mal might not want to sign up for another wild scheme like this - he has to go where the work goes, and the work we can find here might take us somewhere very different."

"I know," River admitted. "Being part of a family is all about compromise. Just saying what I want. And the second - is that I'll need a rare book from Earth-that-was to understand more of the secret code."

"A book?" Simon asked. "Something about cryptography."

"Not really." River sighed. "'Alice in Wonderland' - the annotated edition by Martin Gardner."

"Whew." They were coming back into the busy tavern now. "Tall order. I've heard of 'the Annotated Alice,' of course, but calling it rare - even as a computer file - would be an understatement."

"Well, I like to share these challenged with you, because I know how bored you get with the simple days of saving lives, taking a small part in thrilling heroics, and trying to keep a girlfriend," she pointed out.

"Hey, what happened?" the girlfriend said as they went back into the booth. Simon just shrugged at her with half a smile. "Well, the waitress has already been - I ordered for both of you."

"What am I getting?" Simon shot back.

"No... don't tell him, Zoe," Kaylee insisted. "It's a surprise." Pause. "That goes for you too, little witch," she added as an afterthought to River.

River didn't even try to find out. She liked surprises - most of the time.

-----------

When the four of them got back to the ship, they could see a new and shiny shuttle in the number one dock - Mal and Inara had gotten back just a few minutes before. Everybody gathered in the dining room to catch up on stories, which took a while.

"So, umm, as soon as we'd gotten to the mansion," Mal said, wrapping up his tale. He shot a quick look over at Inara just to try and see how much of the Guild stuff he should tell the crew, but she had a very good bluffer's face on, and wasn't revealing anything. He tried for the very basic minimum that would be needed to tell them, to finish off the story. "There were important people there, from the Companion's guild, who wanted to talk to her - to both of us, actually. About Miranda, among other things. Inara was so good at it that they offered to pay her as a roving scout."

"Oooh, so that means you'll be staying with us permanently?" Kaylee exclaimed, nearly clapping her hands in excitement. Actually, she sortof made the sound of one hand clapping, since her left arm was wrapped firmly around Simon.

"Yes, yes, I'll be here, wherever we may go," Inara assured her. "And that's when they offered us the Thunderhawk, since we'd been on our way to meet with them when the old one got destroyed." She looked over at Mal. "Oh, and somebody mentioned that you'll be credited for the salvage operation on both wrecks, Mal - minus the fines for starting a forest fire on Ares." Mal sighed slightly.

"Speaking of 'wherever we may go,'" he resumed after a moment. "Does anybody have a lead on a job that would take us away from here? I... I think that I've had nearly enough of the Boros neighborhood for now, though I might want to enjoy the city for a night or so. Didn't really get a chance before."

"Yeah, I know what you mean," Jayne put in, stiffly reaching for a drink. "But no, the one job I sussed out here wasn't one to take us elsewhere, and that didn't work out so well." Several of the others chimed in with similar sentiments, about wanting to leave soon but not knowing where to go.

"I... I told you why I want to head for Hera," River said in a small voice. "But that's not really a paying proposition I suppose."

"No, I guess not," Mal said, looking at her. Considering how much that tiny little girl had turned their lives upside down - and shaken, at least, the rest of the whole 'Verse, he wasn't quite sure what he thought of going after eight other Academy escapees. "Also, it's a long way to get to that world, at this point."

"Not if River does her shortcut," Jayne pointed out. "She showed it to me for Higgins' moon, but Athens is just past Hera at this point, right??"

"Nearly ninety million klicks further on," Zoe shot back. "But what's this shortcut, girl? Some kind of a deep-slot across the heart of the system?" River nodded vaguely. "Well, I always did like those... you sure that you're up for it, though?" She narrowed her eyes at River, perhaps trying to measure the younger girl up against her lost beloved as a pilot.

"Ten and a half days, working the slingshot off Verbena," River insisted.

"Well, maybe if we can work out some other business there," Mal said. "Zoe, think you're strong enough to pound the pavements?"

"Not pound on them too hard, sir," she replied dryly. "But maybe they'll talk anyway."

-----------

Mal was quite surprised to see a guy in the uniform of the Boros independents fall in next to him as he returned from a fruitless search towards the ship. At this point, all Mal wanted to do was sneak off somewhere with Inara. "Yes?"

"Captain Reynolds, sir, I was just coming over to meet with you and your crew," the man said. Now Mal realized that he had been there at his meeting with the Administrator.

"Um, look, I've considered the offer, and I just can't... I can't give up my ship yet," Mal blurted out, surprised enough by this meeting to fall back on the truth, if not the whole truth. "I admire what you're trying to do here, but I can't be a part of... of this new government you're trying to start. Not if it would keep me in one place for too long."

The man smiled slightly. "Oh. Well, Mister Weedun will be disappointed, but frankly the office pool was against you taking him up on his offer. Bit of a long shot. I was coming mostly about something else - dropping off the bounty for your man Cobb." He extended a small cloth bag. "Figured that he'd want it in hard currency - I can trust you to see that this makes it to him and his partner, yes?"

"Um... minus my cut, yes, but... but why?" Mal was blinking furiously. "They - they didn't bring the man or the gear in."

"Well, no, but they were brutally assaulted and nearly killed in the course of bringing him in." Mal stared, not quite understanding why that should matter. "The - the alliance might not have cared about anything other than who actually brought the accused to them, and turned a blind eye to poaching between bounty hunters, but we're putting a stop to such things. All marshals had to sign a contract of behaviour before being approved, and your people were clearly in the wrong. They found the suspect, they apprehended him. They get the money, and we'll be pressing charges against the man who actually brought Snowton into the justice department. Of course, now he's claiming that he didn't fire the shots, but I think we'll still have a case. Cobb and Washburne will have to give depositions before you leave the planet. Any notion where you'll be heading next, captain, by the way?"

Mal's head was swimming slightly, and he reached out to steady himself against the nearest ship - which was actually Serenity. "Umm, not really - some business to attend to on Hera, but I'm not sure if we'll be able to get there right away."

"Really? Amazing." The flunky, who Mal was actually starting to like somewhat, smiled eagerly and looked around to make sure that nobody was listening. (Mal idly wondered if River might be spying on them at this moment.) "There is an Independent faction on Hera that is almost ready to declare itself openly as the legitimate government of this world, as Boros has done, except there are a few requirements to consolidate their position first. We have agreed to supply them with armaments, some other badly needed equipment, and a few personnel posessing key skills - we need to make sure that the shipments aren't intercepted by Alliance patrols, and arrive as soon as possible. I think that your ship might be one of the ones that we need."

Mal couldn't help his interest. "How much would the whole job pay?"

"A sliding scale, depending on the time of arrival, assuming everything and everybody arrive in excellent condition."

"My pilot says that she can get there in ten and a half days."

The man's eyes widened. "What, with a deep-slot trajectory?" Mal nodded. "Those are dangerous... but I think that we can come to an understanding."

"Great," Mal said. "By the way, I don't think I remember your name."

-----------

"Oh, yeah, this really was a great idea," Inara said, running a hand over Mal's chest as she lay back in the pool. "Especially since once we get up into space, it's back to nothing but sponge baths for a week and a half, at least."

"Really?" Mal asked, grinning. "I thought that the Thunderhawk had a shower stall in back."

"You're kidding!" Inara looked into Mal's eyes and saw nothing but slightly amused sincerity there. "I... I didn't see a door for one when taking a look around it, but then, I suppose I might have missed it." She moved closer, rubbing her bare skin against Mal's in a way that made him groan. "Not big enough for both of us at once, I suppose."

"No, actually, I think that whoever designed it probably didn't think of that," Mal agreed. "More's the pity."

"Oh well." Inara sighed, completely relaxed. "We'll be able to think of other ways of having fun together, but this won't be one of them."

"No, it won't." Mal shifted slightly so that he could look at his lover's face, and all kinds of things that he wanted to say but couldn't ran through his mind. 'Yes, Inara, I'll leave the ship behind for you.' 'Tell the guild you'll stop seeing clients.' 'Let's get married.' 'Is the way you make me feel when I'm in your arms the way you feel?' And more and more...

"So, I've told the Guild that we'll be on our way to Hera," Inara continued on. "In addition to whatever general dispatches I might file, they've alerted me to a possible investigation - something about two Guild members being held against their will - not clear if it's a legal proceeding, a hostage incident, or something in between." She sighed. "Of course, Guild authorities on Hera are already looking into it, but they might ask for my help in some capacity once I get there."

"And might you ask for mine, or that of the rest of the crew?" Mal asked. Inara hesitated. "If... if you ever do need help, with this or any other Guild assignment, I do hope that you'll speak up about it."

"Yes, of course I will," she agreed, idly waving her hand around in the water and making tiny little splashes.

"And - and why did you REALLY live Sihnon?" Mal suddenly couldn't help asking. "Did you really just want to see the 'Verse outside the core worlds? Were you angling for a job as roving reporter, that you've finally gotten??"

"Ohh!!" Inara let the sound out as a gasp, her whole body trembling. Mal reached up to run his fingers through her wet hair as reassuringly as he could, without even thinking about the gesture. "No, umm, it wasn't anything so simple. Mal... I don't want to keep secrets from you now, but I'm not ready to tell you this yet. Maybe it was unfair for us to get involved without me completing full disclosure, but..."

"Shh," Mal whispered, even as some part of his mind was racing, wondering what could be so bad. "Whenever you're okay to tell me..."

"Before we land on Hera," she blurted out suddenly, and Mal realized that she was nervous over having given herself a deadline like that. Well, maybe it was for the best.

"Okay," he said. "But never think that it was unfair of you to share yourself with me like this, no matter what." Inara smiled a little wryly, but then started giggling when Mal brought his lips to caress her earlobe.

----------

When Mal entered his ship again, (without Inara, as she would be returning about ten minutes later so as to not lead anybody too easily to the conclusion that they had been spending time together,) the cargo bay was a buzz of activity. Zoe and Kaylee had pretty much taken care of the loading, and Mal stared slightly at the piles of ray emission tubes, hypercapacitors, sophisticated scanning gear, and other items packed within the belly of his Firefly.

"Hey, buddy - yeah, I'm talking to you, the guy who's just standing around and waitin' on an exciting picture show," Kaylee called out. "There are bungees right next to you - look alive and start securing the power generator rods. We can't just leave them piled up like so, they'll shift and bump into the rocket warheads as soon as we take off. Lord a'mighty!!"

The guy that she'd called out at did indeed start to make himself useful, and Mal grinned slightly at forewoman Kaylee, (she didn't even notice him lookin' at her,) and headed over to where Simon and River were watching the progress - either lollygagging or supervising in a less active way.

"Any word on our passengers?"

"We've got two all checked in," Simon replied, and Mal was pleasantly smiled that the doctor should be so well informed. Maybe he'd have to start revising his usually cynical opinion of the man's competence in non-mdeical matters upwards. Possibly it was Kaylee's influence. "The third should be arriving presently."

"Right, three," Mal muttered aloud. "Did Inara pack up out of her room in the stern before leaving?" He knew that she had, having stolen a moment with her in the shuttle, but didn't see any harm in playing dumb on that score. "Well, there's one more matter then. River, it hasn't escaped my notice that you've been wanting a spot up front, with the rest of the crew - you're entittled, and now that we have real and true passengers, it only makes sense to keep you seperate from them."

"Yes, sir," River answered. "On the other hand, I'm not sure I'm lookin' to share a bunk - as nice as you are, and Zoe and Jayne..." She trailed off, considering. "Maybe I could sleep in shuttle two..."

"Actually, I guess it's escaped your notice that there's actually a fifth forward cabin, now," Mal said, and smiled with pleasure at the Tam's expressions of complete shock. "Somebody back at Eavesdown docks got our blueprints mixed up with a Firefly model one, and so we got ourselves a bit of a redesign a few ways, and that's one. The hatch isn't in the same corridor as the others, it's off around the corner, near the ladder to the topside airlock, but it's a perfectly good room."

"Okay, maybe," River said, considering this. "Still don't make much sense, for me to be in the bunk closest to the engine room - and the infirmary, and Simon and Kaylee to be in one of the ones nearest to the cockpit..."

"Oh, don't start that, please," Simon replied. "Kaylee loves that bunk - she doesn't care how small it is or how far it is away from her engine, so you'll only stir up trouble by..."

"I don't know, maybe we can manage to convince her," Zoe put in, startling Mal slightly. "There's a few things could do with getting shaken up around here, I think."

"Don't tell me that you want to give up your room, Zoe," Mal muttered. "I'll believe that one when I see it."

"Well, we'll see." She smiled a trace of a smile. "In the meantime, here's our final passenger, a Mister Derek..."

"Derek!" River exclaimed, her eyes bugging out at the pleasant young man standing beside Zoe.

"River!" he replied. "What a surprise to see you here - I thought you said you lived on a really big freighter. Or did your family change postings?" River didn't reply. "Are you Mister Frye, sir?" he asked Simon. "Is your wife around? I'd like to meet the sister-in-law that River mentioned."

River turned around at this point and ran up the stairs, out of the bay entirely. Simon looked at Mal, who just shrugged.

-----------

A few hours after takeoff, half of the crew was gathered in the cockpit to watch as River made the Verbena slingshot. After this, Serenity would be nearly motionless in interplanetary terms, left behind as Boros and its two moons continued on their orbital course through the sky. It would begin to fall towards the sun, and River would use the ship's drive to accelerate that plunge through the heart of the 'Verse, so that they could come out on the other side, near Hera, in only a few days.

This was the point of no easy return - once the slingshot was negotiated, it would take a lot of time and fuel to catch up with Boros again and return to that world, if such a course were even feasible. Mal could see the knowledge of that in the faces of River herself, of Simon and Zoe as they watched.

Mal had to admit that he'd never seen Wash handle a slingshot better. Despite the name, they didn't really catapult off with much more velocity than they had approached Verbena, but the mass of the moon allowed River to easily change their vector of flight.

And as the lavender half-circle dwindled to the size of a playing ball behind them, Inara suddenly rushed in. "News just broke over the Cortex," she told them. "Unrest has just broken out on the Core worlds!"

"What kind of unrest?" Zoe asked. "Is there battle in space?"

"What about Osiris?" River couldn't help but ask.

"I... I don't think so, yet, and I'm not sure," Inara told them apologetically. "On - on Londinium, the civil defense forces have declared 'for the rights of the free people', and there's been skirmishes between them and the Parliamentary guard." Mal groaned. "And - and in the Great City of Sihnon tonight, the lights are of buildings burning."

Mal's heart went out to her as he heard those last words. He knew now, how dear Inara's hometown was to her heart, even after being away for so long. And he knew what it was like to suddenly hear of a disaster afflicting one's home. Without stopping to think if it would look suspicious, he opened his arms and enfolded Inara in them, as her composure failed her and tears started to stream down her cheeks.

"What kind of a hornet's nest are we going to be flying through?" Simon muttered, his voice faint and quavering.

THE END.

(Sequel will probably be forthcoming soon.)


End file.
